billy.soistmann.com

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a movie whose subject matter is less its subject and more a feeling. It is a film that makes you think, but is not intellectual. It relies its audience to react to and interpret what is on-screen rather than just sit back and experience it.

The film features Elizabeth Olsen as Martha (or is it Marcy May?), a young woman who is taken in by her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her husband (Hugh Dancy) after calling them desperately from a pay phone two years after breaking contact with them. That is all we really know. Apart from the set-up, it is unclear how much of the film is true and how much is imagined by the protagonist. If taken at face value, Martha had become a part of the Meyer “family”, a mysterious cult lead by Patrick (John Hawkes). After living with them on a remote farm in the Catskills for over a year, she becomes disillusioned and flees. The story is told through flashbacks (or are they dreams?) as Martha struggled to re-assimilate into ordinary life.

The film is unique in how very unspecific it is. The story unfolds without commentary. We see her become a part of the cult. We see life in the cult. These scenes are interspersed between the present in which we see her psychological distress. The interplay of these sequences are magnificent and do not draw attention to themselves. Sometimes we are left guessing as to where we are until we see a character we recognize. The impressive sound design plays a huge part in tying these disparate images together into thematically-linked material.

The film is limited to Martha’s limited memory and mind. There is no moral stance taken on cults or how they operate. We see one from the inside but this look is in no way exhaustive. Rather than hear about how cults are bad, we see the effect they can have on a person. However, at the same time we do not know for sure whether Martha was ever in a cult or if she is just psychologically unstable. The movie plays with how much it can tell its audience, and what it finds is that less is truly more.

Given such little information, we constantly stretch our minds in trying to fit the pieces together. The film’s narrative makes sense, and so it is tempting to take it at face value. The film works in this way but is far more interesting when taking perception into account.

The film’s protagonist Martha is distressed and every aspect of the production contributes to this general sense of unease that pervades the film. The visuals are shaky and hard to pin down; the setting is oddly lonely and scary; the performances are subtle and moving; the sound design is effective and somewhat noticeable. This feeling of unease and uncertainty is the core of the film.

All of this makes the movie a very subjective undertaking. The film is told from the perspective of its main character and we are not given more information than she has. She struggles in discerning what is reality and what is imagined and in turn so do we. This subjectivity and openness with its main character makes the film unique. Every audience has heard this story before, but certainly not in such a personal way.

It is clear from the beginning that Martha is distressed, however we never are given a scientific reason as to why. Instead, we walk in her shoes. By the end of the film, while we still cannot offer a definitive answer, we are as psychologically unstable as she is. One night, Martha is lying in bed having trouble sleeping when she hears a noise and looks outside. We frantically scan the dark surroundings and find nothing. During a long take we expect to be scared by something jumping out at us. The writer refuses to fall into this cliché temptation. Instead we are left hanging, more terrified.

The final shot is extremely ambitious and serves as a barometer to show you how well the film works. When the film cut to credits I was extremely disappointed. However, any other ending for this film would have diluted its effect. The final shot poses a question that we are not given the answer to. In doing so, the filmmakers have illustrated how well they have recreated Martha’s paranoid point-of-view in the viewer’s mind. This relies not only on conventions of thriller storytelling but also on the entire film which leads up to this sequence. I will not go on more about that final scene for fear of ruining it for you, but look closely and it will tell you a lot about what the film did for you.

Martha Marcy May Marlene tells an engaging story that blends reality and fantasy but more impressively creates not only a mood but also an entire point-of-view. At the end of the film, the audience realizes that, like Martha, we cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction anymore.