MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011)

In Martha Marcy May Marlene, protagonist Marlene Lewis (Elizabeth Olsen) appears to have vanquished the terrible forces bearing down on her within the film’s opening minutes. Under cover of the early-morning quiet, while the rest of her ‘family’ sleep, Marlene escapes the clutches of a cult that has come to dominate her life and identity. In doing so, she tries to free herself from its grip. If only it were that simple.

As Sean Durkin’s feature directorial debut repeatedly shows, running away is the easy part. Living with one’s decisions is considerably more burdensome. Durkin and Olsen make a formidable pairing, combining their creative sensibilities to deliver an anguished portrait of psychological entrapment. Marlene may have found the courage to flee her surroundings and race headfirst towards an unknown future, but in many ways she remains where she was as a devoted member of the cult.

Past and present intertwine effortlessly in this narrative, with hauntingly spare match cuts that illuminate Marlene’s disorientation. While recuperating at her sister Lucy’s (Sarah Paulson) home, she continually finds herself drowning in memories she can’t shake. Lucy tries to placate her wayward sister, but when she reaches out to Marlene, her anguished sister is simply not there—not in any meaningful sense.

Marlene is constantly at odds with reality. She spends her days catching up on much-needed rest, sleeping in a bed for the first time in years. Lucy and her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), are staying at their holiday home for a rare spell of respite from Ted’s work demands, but their lifestyle is still too much for Marlene. She spends much of her time figuratively sleepwalking through life. At other times, she’s like a fly trapped in amber, or someone being silently buoyed by the tidal waves of emotion sweeping over them. Her tortured memories are the closest thing she has to an identity. She clings to them, and they cling to her: an obsessive, parasitic relationship not unlike the one she forged with the cult.

Durkin’s debut is a sensitive, spare evocation of despair, grounding its traumatic narrative in a persistent sense of dissociation. Marlene is alive in the barest sense, constantly sinking back into the past and missing the core elements of a self she lost years ago. She dips in and out of past and present realities, both sparse on detail. Lucy and Ted’s picturesque holiday home, with its material comforts, mostly still waters and spare backdrops, might as well have been plucked from someone else’s dream. The cult is also depicted with few details, its inner workings gradually teased out. This is not a film eager to explain how such groups operate for its own sake; every moment of Martha Marcy May Marlene is focused squarely on its protagonist.

For some viewers, this won’t be a dramatically absorbing experience. Martha Marcy May Marlene is less about Marlene working through her trauma than about the trauma worming its way through her, robbing her of her personhood and her ability to embrace the present. Some films present traumatic experiences as short, sharp shocks. Here, trauma is more like a slow drowning: a gradual loss of the ability to find one’s bearings as life is stripped of what makes it meaningful.

There’s plenty of time to reflect, but none of that reflection is easy. Being reminded of the past doesn’t help Marlene, but it gives the film a uniquely sorrowful perspective on lingering trauma. Because the film never shifts into a higher gear, it’s not always possible to lose oneself in its depiction of pain. But its refusal to patronise its protagonist by sanitising either her pain or her recovery is precisely what makes the film meaningful.

Martha Marcy May Marlene can’t change its steady rhythm; to do so would be a grave disservice to Marlene, who has already suffered too many. Gradually, the film’s patience pays off. By making us sit with Marlene’s distorted reality, Durkin makes it easier to sympathise with her transgressions. As we see her become fully entrenched in the cult and witness its lingering effects, seemingly impossible questions start to seem obvious. How can a person lose their essence? How can someone who has suffered sexual violence at the hands of a manipulator help condemn other young women to the same fate? We need only watch without judgement—a difficult task made easier by Durkin’s sensitivity—to see how readily cracks in the human spirit can form.

John Hawkes makes a formidable cult leader, no easy task given how little we learn about the group’s inner workings. All we need to know is that when he appears, we sit up and take notice. The cast’s subtle but noticeable shifts in expression and demeanour around Patrick (Hawkes) strengthen Hawkes’s performance, and vice versa.

The specific power dynamics are left for us to work out. What matters more are the seismic emotional shifts beneath the most banal interactions, always threatening to erupt. The cult’s message—that some people are born to command others while the rest are meant to submit—requires its followers to lie to themselves. That lie is always on the verge of being acknowledged, and therefore overcome, but never quite is.

Watts (Brady Corbet) is one of the cult’s more compelling figures, with Corbet’s knack for eerie performances put to excellent use once again. Max (Christopher Abbott) is intriguing as a gentler soul, particularly in a cult whose leader preys on its female members, where there can’t be much room for gentleness. However playful or threatening these lackeys seem, their confidence evaporates in Patrick’s presence. Heads bow, conversations dry up, and eyes flick towards the ground or into the distance, feigning interest in nothing.

At the heart of it all is Marlene, once wide-eyed and later anything but. Olsen’s performance is a revelation, every bit as sensitive and evocative as Durkin’s direction. Marlene is often unlikeable in the conventional sense, rejecting Lucy’s attempts to connect and falling back on destructive habits when reality becomes too difficult to bear. But with Olsen at the helm, we can always understand why Marlene begins to fray. She isn’t slowly learning to be a person again. She is wading through the unfamiliar waters of other people’s concrete, ‘normal’ identities and the turbulent sorrow of her past, without ever asking anyone to accompany her. This isn’t a film about celebration or condemnation; it is focused solely on illuminating Marlene’s state of mind, and Olsen is masterful at that.

Paulson is the ideal scene partner for Olsen, portraying an older sister wracked with regret and burdened by her own faults and grievances. Some critics have been quick to point out how little Marlene does to make herself likeable to her sister. But setting aside how difficult it is to seem likeable after such a harrowing ordeal, those viewers would do well to notice how Lucy wields her guilt as a weapon, and to watch the subtle but evocative shifts in emotion between the sisters.

If Lucy has spent most of her life wishing she could have done more for Marlene, it’s certain that this brings her as much resentment as pity for her sister. She feels indebted to Marlene, but has nursed bitterness over those regrets for longer than she can remember. Resentment, guilt and pity seep into many of their interactions. That dynamic is reflected in so many of the conversations and silent conflicts in Martha Marcy May Marlene: Lucy and Marlene continually give up small pieces of themselves without anyone asking them to. An inertia binds, traps and drowns them all at once, and Durkin’s film remains compelling in making viewers sit with this nuanced disquiet.

USA | 2011 | 102 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Sean Durkin.
starring: Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes, Sarah Paulson, Hugh Dancy, Brady Corbet, Christopher Abbott, Michael Chmiel & Maria Dizzia.