Elizabeth Olsen made her big debut as frazzled cult survivor Martha Marcy May Marlene
Film Features Watch This
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: Antonio Campos and Sean Durkin both have new movies coming out, so we’re looking back on other projects released by their production company, Borderline Films.
Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
“Do you ever have that feeling where you can’t tell if something’s a memory or if it’s something you dreamed?” The eponymous protagonist of Martha Marcy May Marlene, played by Elizabeth Olsen, asks this of her older sister following some years apart. Martha is staying with Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), in their plush Connecticut lake house after having made a surreptitious, early-morning escape from another secluded home, a communal farmhouse in the Catskills. But Sean Durkin’s first (and, prior to the upcoming release of The Nest, only) feature is less about memories versus dreams or fact versus fiction than the way traumatic experiences from one’s past can assert themselves in the present.
The film’s neat structure reiterates this idea, often bluntly, by visually blending Martha’s memories of her time upstate with her current stay in Connecticut: She jumps off her brother-in-law’s boat and lands in a creek among splashing members of the commune. She carries a glass of water from her sister’s spotless stainless steel kitchen into a shadowed, unfinished room on the farm. Handfuls of seconds can pass in a new scene before it’s clear just when and where Martha is. Besides being Olsen’s auspicious debut, Martha Marcy May Marlene is perhaps most notable for these formal choices (Durkin would win the Directing Award at Sundance that year), which blur the line between what was and what now is.
Beginning with Martha’s addled call to her sister on a pay phone outside of a diner, we see the effects of her trauma before the trauma itself, creating a palpable sense of foreboding. One morning she pisses herself awake. One night she lies down in Lucy and Ted’s bed while they’re having sex. As Martha’s behavior grows increasingly troubling, the flashbacks to her life in the commune also become more and more disturbing. (The word “cult” did not appear anywhere in Durkin’s script.) The group’s leader, Patrick, is played by John Hawkes, who—one year after Winter’s Bone—portrays another charismatic but dangerous man opposite an ingenue in her breakout role. Hawkes’ performance, like the film as a whole, is as striking for what it avoids as for what it contains. The cliché of the wild-eyed, manipulative Svengali is nowhere to be seen here; in its place is a man who smiles as easily as he closes a hand around a woman’s neck.
Martha cannot yet talk about what happened to her, but often parrots Patrick’s language to Lucy. “Why is the house so big?” she asks when she first sees the lake property. The film hints at Martha and Lucy’s childhood—a dead mother, a mean aunt—without becoming didactic about how an unstable upbringing might eventually lead one sister to embrace the security that an architect husband and wild amounts of money afford and the other to join a cult. The world of the commune is specific and detailed—one can almost smell the body odor in the room where everyone sleeps—while its overriding ideology remains vague, its tenets tacit. Upon her arrival at the idyllic farm, Martha is told that it’s as much hers as theirs. She’s later encouraged to let her guard down in order to more fully become a part of the group. It results in a kind of porousness, made literal when Patrick gives her a new name and when the cult members enter nearby residences at night to burgle them. (That her sister’s is the kind they would rob does not need to be said.) The self is as permeable as a house, the film says. You have to be careful who you let in.
Availability: Martha Marcy May Marlene is currently streaming on HBO Max and DirectTV. It is also available to rental or purchase from Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, and VUDU.
40 Comments
I only saw this a year or so ago but it’s very good. I was surprised at how much it felt like a horror film (granted, I say this as someone who doesn’t really watch horror). Very unsettling despite still being grounded.
I watch a ton of horror and have been arguing that this movie is a horror film for years.
The slight “bells and whistles” in the background adds to the creepiness. I watched it when I was home alone awhile back and had to mute it for a moment because I thought someone was in the apartment.
A good movie with a title that does not stick.The one that is just names. Shit, let me google it. — Me (recommending it for years)
We need a John Hawkes renaissance. He’s really great. Maybe he can gain some weight and play Keith Raniere on the inevitable NXIVM movie.
well shit, that’d be dope
Isn’t that what this movie is, though?Shocking to think that the first mainstream article poking holes in NXIM was published in Forbes in 2003! Christ, it took forever for that house of cards to fall.
this was a decade ago? she legit hasn’t aged a second that wanda witch.
I thought the set-up in this was very interesting and some of the performances, but the dialogue was pretty awful
I have been wanting to watch this for the longest time and discovering it is on HBO Max is awesome. I will definitely be watching this over the weekend.
This movie is fucking terrifying.
Martha Marcy May Marlene was one of those movies that crept up on me. The first time I watched it I thought, “Yeah, that was good. Interesting movie…” And then I found myself thinking about it more, and eventually wanting to watch it again. Knowing how it ultimately played out, I enjoyed it even more upon the second viewing. The movie does an excellent job of blurring reality and memory, and – in slow-burn fashion – increasing the sense of paranoia.
Also, while controversial, I personally loved the ending.
America: I don’t even know who you are!Elizabeth Olsen: You will.
The worst part about this movie is that it wrongfully made me disinterested in the movie “Margaret” because this movie had four times the amount of M names in the title and three times the amount of Mar names in the title, and apparently “Margaret” is amazing.
I loved this movie. Even if the premise doesn’t sound like something that might interest you, it’s worth watching for the cinematography alone. It has this timeless, filmic quality about it—the scenery lush and beautiful but bathed in shadow, hinting at something sinister lurking just beneath the surface or a few feet outside the frame. I’m glad I saw this one in a theater. It’s one of the few movies I wish I could experience again for the first time.
Ah, Elizabeth . . . the thinking man’s Olsen.
The one who didn’t kill Heath Ledger!
Wait, I thought Heath Ledger killed Heath Ledger.
That’s what he wanted you to think.
Ledger’s death was most likely accidental, and Mary Kate Olsen allegedly sold him the drugs that did it.
There’s so many layers, dude.
I’ve long wondered who killed Heath Ledger. Then I realized, after all, it was you and me.
It’s all about the friends you kill along the way.
And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for that meddling Scooby gang!
I like her sisters too, they run a tight business! all around talented family!
Not to be all like this, but she is just a devastatingly beautiful woman.
Don’t be like that, Chicken Mumbles.
I. Can’t. Help. Mys-BUCKAAAH!
I found her to be a brat and liked it when the brother-in-law lit into her when she started spouting her bullshit.
I think that reaction is intended. She is not an audience standin.
So excited for Sean Durkin’s new movie. I remember seeing this on 35mm in the theater and being gobsmacked by how assured the direction was from such a young and inexperienced team. Great movie, great performances.
This and Spring Breakers are the two films I saw in theaters that had 50% of the audience running for the exits within fifteen minutes. I still don’t really know what people were expecting with this one, but it was Portland Oregon and most of the people leaving were older women.
I’ve been waiting a long time for Durkin to direct another film, and I suppose in all that time Olsen hadn’t done anything comparable.
I love this movie.It’s worth finding on DVD because it comes with Durkin’s short film called “Mary Last Seen,” which serves basically as a prequel to Martha Marcy May Marlene— showing how one woman is drawn into the cult and taken there by a, uh, boyfriend. It’s as well done as the movie itself
EDIT— oh here it is on Vimeo! No need to hunt down the DVD after all.
This is such an unnerving movie. I remember after seeing it in 2011 thinking I’d probably never see it again, so disconcerting was the experience. Really remarkable debut.
This movie is great in a lot of ways. Elizabeth Olsen’s performance is fantastic, the cult angle is interesting (and always timely), etc. But Lucy is such an incomprehensible character. It makes sense that at the beginning of the movie that she would be annoyed at her sister’s odd behavior, but by the end of the movie, it should be clear to any human being—even a self-absorbed one—that Martha is ill. Sarah Paulson does what she can, but in the end, Lucy’s obliviousness to her sister’s problems doesn’t ring true.
Idk, to me it felt very true in that Lucy is in heavy denial. The hints of an abusive childhood made me interpret her that after a life of little stability she now has everything and nothing will interrupt that perfect reality she’s crafted for herself – acknowledging and doing something about her sisters obvious issues would disrupt what she has. And in a way it does, since it’s implied the cult arrives in her life once she drops her at the mental hospital. Martha’s musings about dreams and reality seem more poignant in this context.
Can we talk about the ending?
No spoilers from me because everyone (well, OK, most people) should see this movie, but that final shot is so perfect. On par with the last shot of Whiplash in terms of resonance and viewer satisfaction.
Just swung by to reiterate my crush on Ms. Olsen, and pimp the (I think?) underseen and underrated, “Wind River”, starring Jeremy Renner and Miss Elizabeth.
If you have not seen it, I strongly suggest going in as blindly as possible; this film will have you on the edge of your seat more than once, and leave you absolutely gutted by the end.P.S.Her character arc/growth in the film (such as it is) is well worth the watch, too.