Martha Marcy May Marlene Review

• 22nd Jan 2012

Martha Marcy May Marlene is Sean Durkin’s feature-length directorial debut, but you’d never know it from this coolly assured effort. Although not released until October last year and burdened with the clunkiest title since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, it still made many critics’ “Best of 2011” lists.

The film opens with daily life on a modern communal farm where the men and women work and eat separately – the women prepare the meals and eat only when the men are finished. Despite this rather anachronistic set-up, life seems peaceful and easy enough. The first hint that all is not as it seems is when Marcy May (Elizabeth Olsen) makes a run for it and is pursued by some of the other commune dwellers through the woods that surround the farm. This is the only scene in which Durkin indulges in outright, pulse-pounding scare tactics, as Marcy May’s flight inevitably looks like all the other panicked-running-through-the-woods you’ve seen in generic horror thrillers. It also clearly establishes that Marcy May is escaping a cult.

From here on in, however, Durkin dials back the action and allows MMMM (great acronym, that) to settle into its own rhythm, which turns out to be as inexorable and menacing as a zombie’s shuffle. Marcy May manages to get hold of her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who is delighted by the reappearance of “Martha” in her life after a two-year absence. However, it soon becomes clear to Lucy and her husband that Martha’s worldview, emotional fragility and rapidly deteriorating behaviour are going to seriously upset their comfortable existence.

As flashbacks reveal, the David Koresh-like Patrick (John Hawkes) is not a man to accept rejection and it’s not long before Martha realises she hasn’t really left Marcy May behind. As her already fragile psychological state weakens further, the audience is forced to question, along with Martha, just how much of what she sees and hears is real and how much is her mind reacting to past trauma.

Durkin elicits astonishing central performances from Hawkes and Olsen. Olsen would surely be destined for stardom even if she were not the younger sister of Those Twins, and Hawkes oozes dangerous charisma from every sinewy fibre of his being. This movie is a rare thing – a film premised on life in a cult that is neither sensational nor hysterical. Instead, Martha Marcy May Marlene is about how easy it is to create new families and identities for ourselves, though we will only ever have one of each that is “real”. And where does Marlene fit in? That’s the name Patrick demands all the women on the farm answer the phone with.

Clare Moody