Martha Marcy May Marlene

It’s such a joy to see a film in a theater that completely captivates you for its entire running time, and about which you can find nothing whatsoever to criticize. Such a movie is “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” written and directed by Sean Durkin, who appears to be just basically no one, just a guy who’s worked on a couple films as “crew” or as a cinematographer, and who abruptly seems to have written one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. Good on you, Sean Durkin!

“MMMM” stars Elizabeth Olsen, a totally mind-blowing actor I have never seen before either, as Martha, a girl who, we slowly realize, has just run away from a weird rural sex-cult she’s been a member of for 2 years. She calls her sister from a payphone, who is astonished to hear from her after all this time, and who asks her a series of really normal questions for which Martha has really weird answers. She doesn’t know where she is or much of anything else. The sister (Sarah Paulson) comes to get her and takes her back to her crazy fancy mansion on a lake in Connecticut that she shares with her husband, Hugh Dancy.

The film is slow and strange, every shot beautifully composed, every element carefully chosen. It flips seamlessly back and forth through time–Martha jumps off her sister’s deck into the lake but emerges in the past, skinny-dipping with the other cult members. Or she walks into a room in the cult-house, slowly being immersed in darkness, and comes out of the room in the present, in her sister’s mansion. In this way we gradually sort of learn what’s happened to her, although the film remains pretty stubbornly ambiguous in a variety of ways.

The New Yorker review, which I uncharacteristically agreed with, pointed out that in order to really feel the cultiness of a cinematic cult, the cult leader should be played by someone with an almost preternaturally compelling vibe, and that this person is definitely John Hawkes, the adorable little gremlin who you know from Deadwood or Winter’s Bone, and whose face you would be crazy for saying you would not french all the way off.

He’s incredible. What an actor! What a mug on that guy! He plays this grizzled dude named Patrick who basically has a sex cult in upstate New York, like I said. Young women are indoctrinated into the cult by one another, in a gentle sisterly way that is deeply disturbing. At first it’s all laughter and planting seeds in the garden, but the next thing you know you’ve been drugged, dressed in a weird white robe, and left for the raping in Patrick’s attic room. Afterward, the oldest woman in the cult comes to our Martha and tells her to buck up, “because none of us would still be here if what happened in that room was a bad thing.” Her other friend tells her that the pain she’s feeling is “the cleansing. That’s how it starts.” Then John Hawkes gets everyone together in the barn and plays his new song, called “Marcy’s song” (he re-names all the girls once they arrive–Martha becomes Marcy May, hence now 3/4 of the title has been explained to you but not the remaining 1/4 which I will keep a surprise), which is probably the creepiest song ever written. “She’s just a picture / a picture on my wall.”

Later we see Martha herself crushing up a pill and slipping it to a new girl, and then sitting vigil outside the raping-room after laying the girl down on Patrick’s bed.

And other, more disturbing, stuff goes down too.

But intercut with all the culty stuff is the stuff in the sister’s house, which you expect to be a relief after the rape cult, but which somehow becomes just as horrible, in a very different way. Martha is basically a lunatic who can’t function in the world–she can’t eat, she sleeps all the time, she says cryptic horrible things to her sister, who has deep childhood guilt issues about abandoning Martha after their mother died. The husband is getting freaked out because he’s a busy man with bills to pay and Martha is doing things like kicking him down the stairs and climbing in bed with him and his wife while they’re fucking. She’s used to group sex! It’s companionable!

The issue of companionableness is one of the most disturbing parts of this movie, as life in the cult starts to seem, if not nice, then at least social and human in a way that life in her sister’s cold enormous mansion is not. In the cult there is laughter and togetherness, skinny dipping, chores and skills, friendship, and of course the Twilight-like devotion to the magnetic creepy stalker. All of it seems to make life full and interesting, if a little “off.” Like they may be a creepy psycho-babbling cult but at least they have beliefs, and each other. Meanwhile the mansion is empty; the sister and husband don’t seem to like or even know one another very much at all; no one has any beliefs or even likes or dislikes; no one’s allowed to skinny dip; they have this weird party where everyone’s just standing around looking clean and pretty and not having much fun. Like obviously fancy long-stemmed wine glasses don’t automatically make you happy or well adjusted either.

But really it’s not about one being better than the other–obviously the rape cult is an unacceptable way of life–it’s about the impossibility of Martha ever finding peacefulness, as certain events toward the end of the film make literal. She exists in this weird interstitial zone amongst types of communal life and she can’t make any of them work. She’s addled and confused and as the film goes on her confusion becomes so painful.

There’s so much to say about this movie! I loved it so much. It’s beautiful and creepy and sad, and everyone in it does such a good job at acting, and the cinematography and the composition of shots is really unusually good. I hope this guy Sean Durkin makes a billion dollars and at least five more movies.