Martha Marcy May Marlene
By Peter Debruge
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A young woman looking for somewhere to belong finds it difficult to readjust to society after escaping life with a cult in "Martha Marcy May Marlene," a sensitive treatment of a sensational subject that heralds the arrival of talented tyro Sean Durkin behind the camera and promising new star Elizabeth Olsen. Picking up as its heroine breaks free and then using uneasy flashbacks to suggest the character's lingering paranoia, Durkin's effective yet frustratingly obtuse feature debut -- a sister project to his short "Mary Last Seen" -- invites contemplation while withholding the narrative drive needed to break out beyond, yes, cult status.
The tongue-twisting title alone demonstrates Durkin's conscious decision to resist a more commercial approach to the subject -- an artistic attitude likely to win him points with critics, whose support will be essential for this thought-provoking psychological study to find a following. Perhaps the most refreshing break from convention is Durkin's choice to foreground female characters and emotions, starting with Martha (Olsen), whom we meet among her virtual sisters on a seemingly idyllic commune in the Catskills.
Emphasizing observation over traditional exposition, the film opens with a series of tableaus beautiful enough to be paintings. These carefully composed scenes establish that the women, radiant despite their dowdy homemade dresses and lack of makeup, outnumber the men in the overlarge farmhouse, where they must wait their turn to eat and sleep like stray cats in a room crowded with mattresses.
The film is blessed with such a great location -- an isolated white farmhouse surrounded by lush green fields and trees (the same one used in Durkin's earlier short, which serves as a sinister prologue to "Martha") -- that Durkin must work to undermine the retreat's Walden-esque potential, which he does by building tension through subtle body language and an ominous, hollow wind noise on the soundtrack.
One morning, without warning, Martha runs away and calls her older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who hasn't heard from her in two years. At this point, neither Lucy nor the audience understand what exactly she is rescuing Martha from, and yet, without asking questions, she welcomes her emotionally damaged younger sister into the Connecticut lake house she shares with her Ken-doll husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy). Though Durkin allows these scenes to wallow in a sort of lazy-Sunday apathy, with Martha behaving in socially inappropriate ways (such as creeping into Ted and Lucy's room and curling up beside them during sex), he punctuates her secretive recovery with glimpses of what she experienced with the cult.
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http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944343/
Another review:
http://www.slashfilm.com/martha-marcy-may-marlene-review/
