Martha Marcy May Marlene [Blu-ray]

It's hard to know what to make of this movie but having watched it I find myself thinking about it a lot, even if I'm just trying to make sense of it!

Elizabeth Olsen plays a young woman who escapes from a cult and goes to live with her sister and her husband in their idyllic country holiday home. However it is far from living happily ever after as the women clearly have serious issues in their relationship. We also see flashbacks of what life was like for Martha in the cult, which was led by a Charles Manson type figure. These show some startling practices that were treated as normal in the cult.

Martha has clearly been deeply traumatised by what she has experienced and demonstrates this with growing paranoia and mistrust. Her sister and brother in law struggle to cope with increasingly strange behaviour. The constant switching between time periods confuses the viewer so that we start to share in Martha's confusion about her identity (demonstrated by the title of the movie).

The movie moves slowly towards its conclusion with an increasing sense of menace as we see what the cult was capable of but be warned, the ending has no easy answers.

A lot of people will find this movie deeply unsatisfying and that is quite understandable as the director seems to go out of his way, at times, to confuse the viewer. The ending, in particular, is ambiguous. However it is very well made and has as its core a great performance from Olsen as the beautiful but psychologically damaged title character. Some scenes and lines will certainly stay with you for a while after seeing the movie.

Whether that is a good thing or not will be for you to judge!

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a terrific, unsettling and thought provoking film about insanity and being ultimately alone in ones experiences.
The plot follows Martha, a young woman who joins a community in a mountainous region near New York. On arrival something terrible is done to her and we realise that the commune has an underlying cultish nastiness.
When she goes to live with her sister, her experiences of the cult are told in harrowing flash backs. As she remembers what happened we start to question her sanity.
The ending isn't totally satisfying. It is, however, effective, particularly when properly contemplated.
The director Sean Durkin's vision is clearly influenced by cultish communities like the Manson Family. Durkin's unsettling direction of the film is reminiscent of Rosemary's Baby. Both films capture insanity in such a way that the viewer does not often know they are seeing through an insane perspective.
Martha Marcy May Marlene is a slow burning, highly unsettling tour-de-force that should not be missed

The combination of names "Martha", "Marcy May" and "Marlene" reflects the "different faces" and mental confusion of Martha, a young woman who has drifted into life in a cultish commune in the remote Catskill Mountains. Will we ever learn how or why? The film begins with her escape from the community to take refuge with her conventionally middle-class, materialistic sister and her new husband.

The film is unusual in cutting continually back and forth between her life with her sister, in which Martha becomes increasingly more withdrawn and disturbed, and the two years spent in the commune, under the influence of the charismatic but at times menacing, possibly psychotic Patrick, who reminded me of tales of Charles Manson. You need to concentrate hard, not only because of the fragmented storyline, but also owing to the "naturalistic" filming technique, in which people often mumble as in real life, take part in normal, mundane activities and drift across the hand-held lens, perhaps appearing fleetingly at one edge of the screen. Occasional acts of violence erupt suddenly. At times, it has something of the "amateurish" visual quality of "The Blair Witch Project". Much is implied and little specifically stated.

Martha's problems of adapting to "normal life" are portrayed well, together with her relatives' predictable reaction, as when she bathes naked in the lake because that was what she did at the commune. The clash in their values is made clear. One's perception of the commune gradually darkens. At first, it just seems a throwback to pre-female equality days, as we see the women waiting to eat after the men, or the former selecting clothes off a communal rack. Then there is the shocking scene of Martha's ritual initiation to sex with the leader, and so it all gradually gets worse as we come to understand the reasons for her acute distress, complicated by the fact that she is genuinely drawn to an unmaterialistic, commununal way of life.

Although the idea behind the film is interesting, I do not feel that it reaches its full potential. It is too slow-paced and confusing at times and although I do not expect everything to be neatly sewn up, the ending left me dissatisfied.