Last night I went to see Martha Marcy May Marlene at the Esquire theater, a place I haven’t been in some time. It’s a disturbing story of a young woman (played by Olsen twins sister – Elizabeth Olsen) both during and after living with a cult. The cult included elements of sex/sharing each other, initiation and cleansing, gender roles, and manipulation. The cult is, of course, led by a man - the scrawny but commanding Patrick (John Hawkes of Winter’s Bone).
I can’t stop thinking about it.
The many women of the cult seem more like a harem for the group of men that live there. The men are clearly more important in this micro-society. The women make the men food, wait for the men to finish, clean up, and then eat dinner themselves. They seem to serve the needs of the men let’s say. Patrick, the quiet bull of the herd, has his needs met most of all.
The heroine – let’s use the Martha name – does get out of the cult and lands in the somewhat safe home of her sister and brother-in-law. Even though the world of her sister is starkly contrasted with the cult, there is a blurred line between memory, reality, dream, and paranoia. The movie jumps around in time and you don’t always know where you are or what’s really happening and neither does Martha. It was a little painful watching Martha struggle to decide which world is better, that of the structured and sexual cult or the clean, expansive, uncertainty of the real world of her sister’s home.
Watch it but make sure you are expecting to be unsettled.
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