Martha Marcy May Marlene

Grade: B

Story telling is an interesting process. There are so many different ways that you can tell the same story. So many little changes can make big differences in how we perceive the story. You can love or hate the same story based off how it was told, and whether or not we know it we are all aware of this. That’s because we all like to exploit it. You tell the story one way to make you look better. The other person tells it a different way to benefit them. Even if you get two people who are honestly trying to be completely unbiased you will still get two different stories just because we all perceive things differently. And this kind of sucks too because knowing this means that when you hear the story you have to work to sift through what is bias and what is fact.

I say this because after watching Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene I can’t help but notice how similar yet how other worldly different it is from the Greek film Dogtooth. Both are similar in subject. Martha is about a girl who joins cult (lead by a charismatic psychopath) and two years later decides to leave, only to then be haunted by the residual effects from her lifestyle while in the cult. Dogtooth instead focuses on a family that has been isolated from society by their patriarchal father, only to have their world fall to pieces when an outsider is brought into the equation. So not exactly the same but very much the same principal storylines apply. Stockholm syndrome, odd behavior encouraged by the leader, and brain washing are a plenty in both films. They are also filmed similarly in a very minimalist fashion. No fancy tricks with lenses and such (although both have good cinematography). Also little music is heard to give both an uncomfortable tone. The difference though (and a rather big one at that) is that one is a very dark comedy (Dogtooth) and the other is a very serious drama (Martha). See it’s all about how you tell a story.

Now for the review. As I noted earlier Martha is about a girl named Martha. Martha joins a cult, but finds that the deeper she is accepted into the cult’s inner circle the more out of hand things get. It becomes too much for her and she eventually decides to run away. She ends up living with her much older sister at their vacation house in Connecticut with her and her husband. But of course as all this happens you don’t really know any of this. The movie instead decides to tell the story more or less backwards. It starts with her running away, and then through a series of flashbacks we learn about why she chose to run away. It’s an interesting storytelling choice because while (somewhat intentionally) confusing at times, it works to give you more of an understanding of why Martha acts the way she does now.

This is especially helpful because she acts very odd. She tries to swim naked, casually walks in on her sister and husband having sex and rather than leaving the room she curls up in bed with them, and thinks having jobs and earning money is a flawed way of life. In probably the oddest scene of this film, she pees herself while sleeping (which we actually see, it’s not overly graphic I mean she is wearing a dress but it’s definitely one of those “did that just happen” moments) and rather than wash the dress she is borrowing she uses it to clean herself then just stuffs it under the mattress (actually I don’t really understand that scene. I don’t really see what it was supposed to tell us and while it helped it definitely wasn’t necessary for establishing character. It’s just oddity for oddities sake, something this movie does a few times to set the tone of the film). She also has complete breakdowns at what seem like mundane moments. This is all thanks to the residual effects of her life in a cult, and it makes it easier to understand this thanks to telling most of the story through flashbacks.

Martha’s actions also work as interesting commentary on how easily we can get conditioned to things, even if they are terrible. Before she seems like she was a relatively normal girl, but now she does many different odd things that she no longer finds odd thanks to being fully immersed in her cult lifestyle. It makes life for her on the outside all that much more difficult. It’s bad enough she is constantly haunted by the fear of them tracking her down, but she also doesn’t fit into this new world either. She simultaneously fears her old lifestyle and is nostalgic for its logic. It’s like a child with an abusive parent who grows up to treat their kids the same way. They hate the way their parent treated them, yet when it comes to parenting that style is all they know. Its equal parts interesting and scary. The movie does a great job of adding to this feeling by doing a lot of master shots and long takes in large empty rooms. By pulling out on the camera and showing everything, we see just how empty and solitary her life is now.

As we learn more about Martha’s cult life we learn that most of it revolves around the group leader named Patrick (played by the brilliant and ridiculously underrated John Hawkes). Patrick is like most cult leaders. He’s very sure of his beliefs and he is charismatic enough to convince weak minded people that his way of life is the right one. He runs a farm and has the men that join go out and recruit new members. Once at the farm they will work all over doing various chores. He treats the women like second class citizens as he makes them make the meal and then wait to eat until the men have finished. He also rapes all the women once. I say once because after he rapes them the first time they are then convinced by the other women (who were at some point originally convinced by him) that this act was not rape but rather a privilege and part of their duty here at the farm. Then going forward they are more of a willing party to these actions. He does other very bad things, but I don’t want to ruin too much of the film for you so I will leave it at that.

Simply put, he is haunting. He has that type of sociopathic logic that is insanely flawed yet seems to make enough sense to impressionable people that they follow. At one point he gets one of the girls to kill a cat because it is sick and needs to be put out of its misery. He then instantly ups the ante and tries to get Martha (who he calls Marcy May because he calls the girls by whatever he wants, probably as a way of establishing dominance) to shoot one of the boys from the farm to prove a point to the boy and to see if he could get her to do it. He’s always in control and will hurt you if you question this fact.

This is pretty much the set up for the rest of the film. We delve deeper and deeper into Martha’s cult life until we fully understand why she left. We also simultaneously see her constantly at odds with her new life at her sister’s place. Then the movie just sort of ends. It’s really odd too. Everything seems so well thought out, but then there is absolutely no ending. Well there sort of is, but it’s ambiguous and very abrupt. It’s this movie’s one big glaring flaw and it’s too bad as everything else was almost pitch perfect. If you are wondering about the grade, this ending is what held this movie back from creeping up to the B+ to A- range.

To contrast, the acting was top notch. This movie is carried by two characters: Martha and Patrick. If they didn’t get the right people for these parts this whole movie could have easily fallen apart. There was a lot of buzz about Elizabeth Olsen’s performance in this movie and it is all just. She is on the screen probably around 90% of the time in this movie and this was very much a role she had to go all in with and she did. I wouldn’t say she is a surefire star in the making, because I wasn’t naturally drawn to her like a superstar and she was overshadowed at times, but she definitely has the chops to be a big name in Hollywood. The person who would sometimes overshadow her was John Hawkes. To anyone who has seen Winter’s Bone this is no surprise as he was fantastic as the scary meth addict Teardrop. He is also quite terrifying in this film too but in a completely different way. His unwavering confidence and sociopathic behavior were chilling. I found myself excited every time he showed up on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that a man so small and wiry could be so terrifying.

I think I’ve used haunting to describe parts of this movie 4 times now, and that’s because it’s extremely apt. I could look for another word to use but it just won’t be as fitting. Even the ending, while abrupt and ambiguous, almost worked because of how haunting this film is. This movie was made to eat away at you, in the same way the residual effects of living at Patrick’s farm eats away at Martha, until you too become sufficiently (for lack of a better word) haunted.

It should also be noted that this movie has a lot of nudity in it. I couldn’t find a way to properly fit that into the review but I felt like it should be noted so you know what you are getting into as far as a viewing audience for this movie.