Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin’s new film, is at once startlingly assured and remarkably frustrating. Elisabeth Olsen, in a brave, star-making performance, plays Martha, a troubled cast-off who reunites with her sister (Sarah Paulson) and her husband (Hugh Dancy) at their swank Connecticut lakehouse after her escape from an abusive cult in upstate New York. Much of the film centers on the tension resulting from Elisabeth not knowing the whereabouts of the cult members. Did they follow her to the house? Are they coming to take her away? She hears stones being thrown on the roof in the middle of the night, which she knows the cult members do in order to gauge whether a family is home before they rob their house. Do the noises really exist, or is the traumatized Martha imagining it all?
Much analysis of Durkin’s film has focused on the notion that it is difficult to decide at any point in time what is real and what is imagined. This is undoubtedly Durkin’s aim; our main protagonist is, it seems, supremely unreliable. But the film’s problems have less to do with its supposed abstractness and more to do with its structure. Rather than trying to discern dream from reality, a more pertinent question seems to be this: if you reassembled Martha Marcy May Marlene to run in chronological order, would the film lose any of its impact? The question may not be entirely fair, as it is true that the film is what it is, and should be judged as such. And the choice to fragment the story arguably plays to the film’s strength, which is establishing an emotionally claustrophobic environment for Martha. But there is something to be said for the practice of attempting to wring extra meaning from a story simply by cutting it into pieces and rearranging the fragments to induce fleeting confusion. It is clear that Durkin looks to achieve a sense of alienation, loss, and emotional disconnect by using this technique, and at times, he succeeds. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the film is particularly skillfully assembled. It simply means that the audience takes a little longer than usual to figure out when and where a scene is happening. Once that recognition sets in, Durkin tends to settle into fairly conventional thriller rhythms. Nevertheless, the filmmaking here is effective. Durkin has an eye for composition, and the way some of his scenes seem improperly exposed or underlit seems evocative rather than amateurish (much of the film looks like a half-exposed Polaroid picture, a clever play on the elusiveness of memory). He clearly has talent, and this is one of the more assured debuts of recent memory.
There is a shot somewhere toward the end of the film in which we see Martha wandering in a daze outside her sister’s house. The picture is bleached out and she walks back and forth, in and out of focus, for twenty seconds or so in front of a static camera. It’s a standout moment of aesthetic uncertainty, shot through with undertones of the same kind of paranoia and confusion that is often elucidated too explicitly in other spots by the omnipresent pulsing score or the constant shrieking of Martha’s sister. Durkin would have done well to infuse the rest of Martha Marcy May Marlene with the kind of vitality and abstractness in this shot; simple fragmentation of narrative can only go so far, and in the end the film settles for being more of a conventional thriller than Durkin would have seemingly liked it to be.
