Martha Marcy May Marlene: Reality or Right

It isn’t a coincidence that when the film is mentioned, people question its name saying, “I can never remember it.” Just as it’s audience grapples to piece the title together, Martha, the film’s young and bewildered protagonist, is trying to piece together her identity.

The feature debut from both director, Sean Durkin, and his captivating leading actress, Elizabeth Olsen, is wildly impressive. Durkin creates the two parallel worlds that pull Martha in painfully different directions with his subtle, gently terrifying script and the power of the camera. Vacillating between the two worlds through dream-like and unsettling transitions, we’re left feeling just as disoriented as Martha, which proves intriguing and at times the choppy sequencing avoids the opportunity for exploration.

Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) has been living in a commune in the Catskills, a mysterious farm with odd practices. The men always dine before the women, and everyone sleeps in one room, sharing their space and sacrificing their privacy. Their leader Patrick has betrothed Martha the name Marcy May and welcomes her into the family. When Martha disappears into the woods one day, the quiet rustle of the trees leaves an ominous effect; where will flee to and why is she running away?

Martha finds refuge with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) at their Connecticut summer home nearby. Martha has been gone for two years, and immediately Lucy notices a change in her sister. When Martha jumps into the lake nude, she’s repulsed and covers her with a towel saying, “You can’t do that around here! People could be watching!” Martha helps with meals, but barely touches the plate, wanders around the house listening and watching, but barely awake.

The film jumps between Martha’s past and present. Just as she puts a glass of water to her lips, the scene changes and she’s suddenly back at the farm. As the film disentangles, more is revealed about their rituals, and when Patrick has the females drugged and raped, as a sort of initiation and “beginning of the cleansing”, we realize something is terribly wrong here.

The film doesn’t’ stay anywhere for too long. As scenes reach their climax and it seems as if a discovery is in reach, the setting switches. This propels the film forward with a suspenseful and continually puzzling manner. Martha’s anxiety and strange manners at home, unavoidably obvious when she crawls into bed while Ted and Lucy are making love, leave us dying to know what she could have possibly gone through to result in this behavior.  And slowly, we see how manipulating Patrick and his commune were to the delicate Martha, whose naivety may have been more from her longing for meaning than her lack of smarts. It’s the only way her strength to escape in the first place can be justified.

Although the transitions are beautiful, and clever, disappearing into each other like skin into skin, confusing you and mystifying you, they begin to consume the story. They are there for a purpose, to depict the blurred lines of reality that Martha is experiencing, but they distract from the truth in Martha’s situation. The film never quite reaches its peak. It moves so quickly that it can’t latch on to the horror Martha faced. All the unanswered questions leave you wondering if the writer perhaps didn’t want to answer them for fear, or if Olsen’s vacant glances sometimes in fact did have nothing behind them.

But despite its few flaws, in both the script and performances, the film is an extraordinary body of work.  Olsen handled the task of grounding Martha, an un-grounded character, through convincingly realistic interactions with those around her. She operates in a love/hate relationship with her sister that we all can find familiar and when she tells Ted that you don’t “need money” she delivers it with eerily disillusioned confidence.  Olsen believes everything her character believes, and when Martha mistakes a bartender for one of the commune members, Olsen sees him as vividly as if he were actually standing before her, then we begin to question our own ability to see clearly. And if anything, it’s the reason why Martha Marcy May Marlene remains so poignant; the audience can’t help but walk out questioning what is real, or for that matter, what is right.