Martha Marcy May Marlene (2012)
We first meet Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) laying the table for dinner at a seemingly benign rural commune, but the heavy way in which she thumps the plates down suggests that there’s something darker underneath the scenes of serene communal slumber and back-to-basics manual labour. Fleeing the commune for what one would assume to be safe haven in her sister Lucy’s fancy lakeside house in upstate New York, what happened to Martha is revealed to us in dribs and drabs, finally managing to overwhelm the present day narrative completely as Martha’s fractured state of mind becomes ever more self-evident. At first, Martha’s contrary ways to Lucy and her husband Ted’s lifestyle are awkwardly humorous. She swims naked in the lake, questions their need for such a large house and laughs at her sister’s attempts to make her wear pretty, girlish dresses. It’s a strangely non-combative form of protest, if it can even be called that, but, as Sean Durkin’s assured debut tells us, Martha is an expert in slipping in unobtrusively. Seduced by the patter of John Hawkes’ community leader, Patrick, we’re never told exactly what Martha might be running from, but she’s quickly welcomed into the fold, where she is renamed Marcy May. Handfuls of scenes depicting blissful domesticity soon give way to more insidious forms of indoctrination, leading to a not-entirely-convincing denouement (even if it’s effectively terrifying in its execution) that triggers Martha’s flight. It’s what comes before and after this shocking event that lingers. The cuts between past and present can occasionally feel too literal – a dip in the lake becomes a daredevil leap from a rockface, for instance – but the way in which these traumas spill over into the present day timeline brings with it a creeping sense of fear. Elizabeth Olsen gives a remarkable performance, open and sensual enough to sell her pliability, but so glassily resolute in her own sense of self that her brief outbursts of anger and repudiation appear a worrying inevitability, a coiled snake that signals a portent of things to come. The more we learn about Martha, the more her fate seems self-determined, stifling and claustrophobic. Her sister’s home begins to feel less and less like a refuge, and more like a prison cell. As Lucy presses for solid answers to those questions she does know how to ask (at one point blurting out, “Were you abused?”), so Martha becomes ever more distant, unable to escape her own mental torment. As Ted talks about feeling unsafe and shipping Martha off to a psychiatrist, so the walls close in on her. A chilling image towards the end demonstrates just how trapped Martha is, and how deep down her psychosis is buried. The film’s needlessly abrupt ending robs its final moments of some of their power, but the gooseflesh-y feeling of what’s come before is pervasive and deep-rooted.
