Prospect recommends: Martha Marcy May Marlene

 

Martha Marcy May Marlene: not your regular US indie film

Martha Marcy May MarleneOn release from 3rd February

This grippingly creepy tale of cult trauma begins like a regular kind of US indie film. On a Catskill mountain farm, healthy, attractive young people in simple work clothes are doing chores in the “magic hour” of sunlight so familiar from Terrence Malick’s films. But to the beautiful Martha (played with subtle grace by newcomer Elizabeth Olsen), this seeming idyll is revealed to be anything but heavenly.

Renamed Marcy May or Marlene, she has been recruited into a cult run by psychopath Patrick (John Hawkes) who drugs the women and forces himself on them. Martha escapes, getting her sister Lucy to bring her to the Connecticut lakeshore house she shares with her husband Ted. In her sleep Martha returns to the horrors she’s experienced; and when awake she reacts bitterly against her sister’s rich lifestyle—yet at the same time she fears that the cult may come for her.

Director Sean Durkin skilfully builds audience discomfort and apprehension through surprise. He infuses the film’s intimations of violence with a subtle dread that reminds one not of Malick but of that sly Austrian master Michael Haneke (Caché, The White Ribbon). Go and shiver.