For someone with enough of an ego to believe that there may actually be people out there who read this blog, what I'm about to say may sound surprising. If you have already decided to see Martha Marcy May Marlene, please stop reading immediately. It's true that often films can be enjoyed more the less you know about them, but with MMMM, as I will call it from now on, it is ideal to enter the cinema with as little idea of possible as to what you are about to see. For anyone still reading, I'll try and give away as little of the plot as possible.
At the very beginning of the film, we see the titular character, played by Elizabeth Olsen (the one it's okay to like) running away from an unusual, but seemingly harmless rural commune and taking refuge with her estranged sister and brother-in-law. Needless to say, nothing is what it seems. Olsen is not the plucky heroine her flight would suggest, and the 'family' she has fled from, led by father figure Patrick (John Hawkes), is not the eccentric but oddly idyllic retreat it may have appeared. For anyone who knows anything about America in the 1960s, faint bells of recognition should be ringing at the idea of a close knit 'family' of misfits and the disenfranchised living in the wilderness, led by a manipulative 'father' and making night time excursions into people's houses.
Considering that this is Sean Durkin's debut, the directing is brilliantly assured and the performances are uniformly magnificent, particularly the fractured Olsen and the horribly sinister Hawkes, unbearably creepy without ever being overstated. Although it may never seem like it, MMMM is at it's core a horror movie, albeit a sparse, enigmatic and intelligent one. Rather than offer the puerile gross outs of Hostel or the cheap bump in the night shtick of Paranormal Activity, MMMM succeeds where so many horrors fail: it slowly creeps under your skin and then stays there long after the credits have rolled.
I hope this has been unhelpful. Just trust me, and see it.
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