Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene” opens with a cryptic scene gradually revealing a disturbing milieu: a group of men sit quietly at a dinner table, finishing a meal. Cut to a row of women in another room, also sitting quietly, looking at nothing in particular. As the men get up and leave the room, the women slowly file in. There’s a creepy formalism at work, both in the mis-en-scéne (both groups of men and women fill the widescreen frame with precise, opposing, horizontal geometry) and the behavior (mechanical and forced, almost coerced). And by the time Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) awakes in the night, making her way out of the house and tip-toeing around sleeping bodies, we have some sense of what she’s fleeing. This claustrophobic opening perfectly conveys a stifling (as well as disturbingly hierarchal and patriarchal) environment. What follows is a bold psychological drama in which Martha trades one kind of imprisonment for another, while realizing that leaving a place isn’t the same as escaping it.

Much of the proceeding narrative follows a specific tack, hinting at meanings—and it’s a credit to Durkin’s screenplay that he can control a lack of traditional exposition with such precision. Once Martha's fled the compound, a young man finds her at a diner; he’s polite enough, if a bit forceful (he helps himself to Martha’s lunch), but her reaction to his presence suggests all manner of terror. After Martha’s sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) comes to collect her, we spend time with the sisters at Lucy’s expensive (and expansive) lake home. Here Durkin shifts seamlessly between past and present, as Martha’s memories bleed through into her new life, giving the audience some idea of what transpired before the film’s opening. Conversations between Martha and Lucy give just a hint as to their childhood, while the lake house itself provides a kind of playground for Martha to get lost in, her mind wandering into waking, paranoid aural fantasies.

And lost she is. There’s an acute irony at play here; while in the compound, Martha is constantly sharing the frame with other people. Released into a ‘proper,’ domesticated home, she seems to physically shrink, as if trying to take up as little space within the frame as possible. For his part, Durkin constantly frames her left or right of center, leaving wide chasms of negative space within the frame as Martha slumps into a corner or onto a floor. Without judgment, without manipulation, Durkin lightly sketches reasons for Martha’s departure: she was running from, and looking for, something. Lucy and her husband (Hugh Dancy) are a little too prim, a little too proper; their manner's correct, but there's a hint of calculating judgment behind their smiles. They seem to suggest this is how one should live—big house, proper education, knowing the right people. It’s no wonder Martha felt so out of place where she was, why she succumbed to a cult—it was the temptations of belonging, mutual understanding, etc. But her new ‘family’ turned out even more schizophrenic, its patriarch (John Hawkes) subjecting her to increasingly violent delusions, and Durkin peels back the layers with expert timing for maximum discomfort. 

Elizabeth Olsen has acquired all kinds of accolades for her performance, and with good reason. But I can’t say enough about Sarah Paulson, as Lucy. Hers is arguably the more difficult role, insinuating the preexisting divide between the siblings while offering an apparently genuine desire to help her now unstable sister, finally succumbing to mounting frustration at Martha’s inability to communicate anything that’s happened to her. There’s a moment when Martha tells Lucy, matter-of-factly, that she’ll make a terrible mother; the expression on Paulson’s face is a canvas of mixed emotions, channeling hurt but also anger at this petulant child who's judging her. John Hawkes meanwhile continues his run of intimidating authority figures, his gangly, awkward frame belying a certain tense energy. He’s got ingratiating eyes, and by simply narrowing them and casting a firm gaze, he can level a person. 

“Martha Marcy May Marlene” may be the best debut feature film I’ve seen all year. It’s a sparse but tightly controlled narrative that moves ahead with all manner of ellipses and innuendo, with characters and a backstory hinted at without being needlessly over-explained. If there’s a diffuse quality to the film’s narrative, it is neatly counterbalanced by Durkin’s rigid scope compositions—it’s as if the frame itself is the only thing keeping this world together. A word on the end of the film though, which has left some viewers confounded and put out; at first blush, it left me cold. Not unlike Michael Haneke at his most calculating, the film’s coda initially seemed designed simply to generate an ‘ah-ha’ moment, giving the audience something to mull over on their way out of the theater. But I’ve gradually come around. I think ultimately that it doesn’t matter if the final moments represent a threat or not, nor should it confirm or deny Martha’s paranoia. What’s important is that we are inside her subjective experience: the fear and doubt in that final moment is pure insight into Martha’s mind. Whether with reason or not, she's always going to be looking over her shoulder. It’s a potent reminder of the damage she will always carry with her.

Review by:
Daniel Gorman