Sean Durkin (2011)

In order to tell the story of what happened to twenty-year-old Martha during the two years she was out of contact with her elder sister Lucy (her only family), the writer-director Sean Durkin depends on an artificial delaying tactic.  Martha escapes from the commune she’s been part of in the Catskill Mountains and phones Lucy, who drives upstate to take Martha back to the lakeside holiday home elsewhere in New York State that Lucy and her new husband Ted have recently bought.   Martha’s behaviour there is so bizarrely anti-social that it’s hard to believe the humourlessly conventional Lucy and the pompous professional highflyer Ted (a developer) put up with it for as long as they do.  They make next to no attempt to get Martha to explain where she’s been and, although she’s making their lives an unpredictable misery and they can see she’s seriously disturbed, it takes a long time before they do anything about it.  (In the film’s last quarter-hour they arrange Martha’s admission to a mental hospital.)  Even allowing for Lucy’s half-hearted guilt about failing in her relationship with her younger sister, Ted would surely have called time once he discovers Martha, who’s slipped into the couple’s bedroom unheard, lying on the bed beside them as they’re having sex.   The film moves back and forth between this ménage à trois and Martha’s memories of her experiences in what plot synopses of Martha Marcy May Marlene standardly describe as ‘an abusive cult’.  The latter sequences are absorbing.  I grew increasingly impatient with those chez Lucy and Ted.

In terms of atmosphere and movement, though, Durkin’s first feature is good.  The unstressed transitions between past and present make clear how these co-exist in Martha’s mind (the editor is Zachary Stuart-Pontier).  The life of the cult – in their cramped house and the spread of cultivated but gaunt land outside it – is described as a series of routines which, because they’re routines, convey a sense of what’s become normal life for the inhabitants, even though it seems to an outsider perverted.   This quality is centred on the presence of the cult leader, the usually (and unusually) calm and quiet Patrick.  Wiry John Hawkes is fearlessly empathetic in the role.   His composure gives Patrick authority and, by investing him with an unaccountable seductiveness, Hawkes makes him more disturbing than a conventional bogeyman would be.  You’re aware of his charm but, because his behaviour is so shocking, you keep recoiling from Patrick – when this happens, you feel disturbed by being charmed.  Patrick sits on the staircase and, through the banister, watches the young men in the cult having sex with the girls.  He does so with a pacific intentness.   When he himself is penetrating the girls from behind, he’s unignorably present yet there’s also an insubstantiality about him – he’s a real incubus.  (The members of the harem sometimes give birth.  We learn that the babies are all boys:  presumably girls are killed as soon as they emerge from the womb.)  Playing his guitar and singing a song dedicated to Marcy May (Martha’s cult name), Patrick has a modest, gently romantic air.  John Hawkes was deservedly Oscar-nominated for Winter’s Bone last year but he goes well beyond that fine performance here.  He’s not been nominated this time simply because he’s bringing a deviant to life in a complex and an uncomfortably believable way.

It’s a strength of Martha Marcy May Marlene that the world of Lucy and Ted is, compared with the cult world, both comforting in its normality and rebarbative in its materialism.  There are times when you understand Martha’s nostalgia for the commune life and Patrick has more interesting things to say than either of the normal couple – for example, that when you feel fear you live more fully in the present.  Supporting and enclosing the narrative are the spare music of Daniel Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans and a sound design in which ominous, unidentifiable noises are explained as something perfectly normal yet retain an echo of their initial, disquieting charge.

Elizabeth Olsen – whose face sometimes calls to mind Maggie Gyllenhaal’s but whose body is squarer and shorter – is strongly expressive in the title role.  (Martha seems to use the name Marlene when she’s answering the phone in the communal house – although there’s another woman there called Marlene too:  see below.)  Martha is locked into her experiences in the Catskills but Olsen shows glints – in the cult as well as when she’s with Lucy and Ted – of a sociable, stable, unremarkable girl.  She manages to make Martha both stupefied and raw.  Sarah Paulson as Lucy is convincing as a woman who’s narrow-minded, however much she tries not to be.  (Lucy is trying to have a baby; when Martha yells at her that she’ll be a lousy mother it’s upsetting both because the hurtful remark reduces Lucy to tears and because you feel Martha’s likely to be right.)   Hugh Dancy is amusingly humour-free as Ted, especially in his uneasy attempts to laugh at Martha’s milder eccentricities:  he provides a witty relief from the prevailing grimness.

There are two points at which Sean Durkin delivers shocks that seem to belong in a more conventional horror film – although the shocks are undeniable.   The cult members sometimes break into and steal from houses when the owners aren’t in or aren’t looking.   On one such break-in, the man of the house confronts the intruders.  After an edgy, menacing conversation with Patrick, they appear to be on the point of leaving.  Then one of the women (Marlene?) appears at the back of the frame.  It’s a familiar ‘Look behind you!’ moment but when she knifes the home owner in the back, it has impact because there’s been no comparable violence in the film until then.  In the final sequence, as Ted and Lucy drive Martha to the mental hospital in New York City, they narrowly avoid an accident with a car which then continues to tail them.  We recognise it as Patrick’s car.  Until this point we’ve assumed that her paranoid fears of the cult and that she can’t get away from it are all in Martha’s mind. The concluding image of Patrick’s car through the back window of Ted’s brings those fears into real life in a new way.  It supplies a scary jolt from which, because the film stops at this point, there’s no chance to recover.

6 February 2012