Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene
–Make no mistake about it – Martha Marcy May Marlene is a horror film, although made with elegant reticence and tact. Sean Durken’s 2011 concerns a young woman who has walked away from a cult residing in a farm house in the Catskill Mountains. Although this woman is named Martha, she has been re-named by the cult leader, Patrick (a chilling performance by John Hawkes) “Marcy May” – from time to time, she uses the other names in the title as well. Upon the leaving the cult, the young woman goes to diner on the highway. A boy follows her there and, in a whispered conversation, urges her to return to the farm. Instead, she calls her sister, gets picked up at the diner, and, then, stays with her sister and her husband at a lake cabin about three hours away from the cult’s farm. Nothing significant really happens. As time passes, it becomes apparent to Martha’s sister and husband that the young woman has been severely damaged by her experiences at the farm – but Martha doesn’t explain the nature of the events at that place and her back-story is gradually disclosed by a series of flashbacks. With enormous subtlety, we learn only gradually the reason for all of the “M” initials in the film’s title – the movie’s M refers to the Manson family and some of the events at the farm seem modeled on incidents associated with Charley Manson. This is classical film making, exquisitely modulated and completely lucid. The film deserves the many prizes that it has won – including an award at the 2011 Sundance Festival. Martha’s odd behavior causes her sister to believe that she has been abused – but the young woman, brilliantly played by Elizabeth Olsen (she is a younger sister to the famous Olsen twins, TV child stars a decade ago) seems resilient, is defiant, and, in fact, lectures her sister and brother-in-law on their materialism and greed. She seems completely rational and competent until we observe her stripping off her clothes without any hesitation to swim naked on a semi-public beach and, later, casually joining her sister and brother-in-law in bed when they are having sex because “(she) can’t sleep alone.” (The regimen at the cult involves group sex and systematic rape by the creepy cult leader.) Durken eschews the obvious: we expect that Martha will try to seduce her sister’s husband or casually have sex with him – but, in fact, the experiences at the cult’s farm compound have made her essentially asexual and child-like. Similarly, the film is set up for a violent confrontation with the cult and its frightening leader. The confrontation never occurs. Even so, the film’s ending is more frightening and haunting than would be the case if Durken had staged the fight that we have been cued to anticipate. Every aspect of the film is highly controlled and effective. The farm compound seems hedged in by a dense, dark, forbidding forest. When the cult members seem to threaten the lake cabin, Dirkin shoots the surrounding woods – which earlier seemed pleasant and sun-dappled – as a wall of sinister green shadow. There are slight visual cues to suggest that the conventional Yuppie life-style of the sister and her husband is also stylized and cult-like, but this theme is handled with skill and tact – the image implying this theme, Martha’s virginal-white robe-like gown at her “coming-out” party at the cabin that invokes the robe she wore during her ceremonial rape at the compound, is so subtle that, perhaps, I am only imagining this motif. Dirkin uses offscreen space like a horror-film director: we are afraid of things lurking in the shadows. In one scene, the cult members lurch toward a lake cabin filmed from behind in the darkness – they stagger a little like zombies. There is almost no violence in the film, but the few episodes of this nature are enormously frightening and forceful. The movie seems a little like Val Lewton The Seventh Victim and suggests that producer’s exceedingly understated approach to horror – an approach that manufactures fear from the unseen and the viewer’s imagination. The terrifying thing about the cult and its members is that they are almost normal – most of what we see is completely innocent. Dirkin’s soundtrack is skillfully recorded – we hear the gas-hum of an old-style Coleman lantern (the farm house has no electricity) when Martha is raped and when that sound re-occurs, the images, which are Iowa Gothic farmhouses and meadows, are suffused with dread. One of the most frightening moments in the film is also the quietest: the cult leader with his scraggly Jesus of Nazareth beard sings a song about Marcy to the members of the “family.” It’s like the scene in The Shining when we see that Jack Nicholson has been typing the same phrase for hundreds of pages. Everyone listens raptly to their leader’s song, but it makes no sense at all – it is nightmarish gibberish. The film has an ambience of a bad dream: you want to get away but can’t.