Subtly acted, beautifully shot, crisply paced, cleanly edited, deeply disturbing: this quiet, tense thriller is a remarkable sketch of a communal cult and its leader, and the traumatic effect these have on an impressionable young woman.
The four female names are actually three names given to the same woman (Elizabeth Olsen). Martha, Marcy May and Marlene (M3) signify distinct identities as well as stages of initiation. Martha is the given name of the seeker, a woman who becomes Marcy May as an initiate into the cult, and then a generic Marlene Lewis as a member answering the commune’s land line.
Calm naturalness makes this movie affecting and scary. With the exception of the closing credits, there is no theme music. There is folksy ambient acoustic guitar music on the commune, Sarah Vaughn at a party, and Kabuki-like electronic sounds that stand for passions of the mind. Otherwise, the action is steeped in the rural sounds of nature, a kind of silence that can be indifferent to the point of threatening.
Early one summer morning we see a young woman—M3—quickly leave a New England farmhouse on foot through the woods. Others pursue her, but she makes good her getaway to a nearby town. Watt (Brady Corbet), a man from the commune, later finds her in a diner, but does nothing to prevent her departure.
M3 calls her elder sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) to pick her up in the town. We find out later that Lucy drove three hours to pick up her sister ‘in the Catskills’ and bring her to an affluent summer house on a lake in Connecticut that she shares with her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy), an architect or real estate developer in Manhattan.
M3 and Lucy’s parents are long gone. Lucy was in college while M3 was still living at home and going to school when their mother died. They never mention their father. An Aunt Dora moved into the family home and raised M3. Lucy had not seen or heard from M3 in at least two years, nor had been able to reach her by M3’s cell phone. M3’s long absence was strange but apparently not out of character: Lucy appears not to have contacted anyone in authority that she was missing.
The story takes place roughly within a ‘present’ of Ted and Lucy’s two-week summer vacation at the Connecticut lake house. The narrative moves forward, intercut seamlessly with scenes from M3’s past as a cult member. Strange things happen at night. Successive segments fill in critical pieces of information about M3’s experience with this group, steadily building tension to the end.
The acting by this cast of young actors is notably good. Their facial expressions and gestures speak more eloquently than their words, and Jody Lee Lipes’ camera appraises them the way people size up their interlocutors and watch each other in conversation. On the other hand, Lipes does not find the values that Sven Nykvist would have shooting in natural light, thus the picture seems literally a lot darker than necessary.
M3’s post-traumatic stress at first comes across as eccentric, ‘hippy-dippy’ behavior, but its effects echo causes. She has witnessed terrifying events. A small scene that seems almost bizarrely comic in shocking Ted and Lucy underlines the deep trauma this young woman is facing, which reduces her to a scared child. It makes for a stunning, heart-breaking dramatic moment.
As much as M3 presents a portrait of a post-traumatic stress, Patrick (John Hawkes), the soft-spoken cult leader, is a chilling sketch of a psychopath, along the lines of clinical descriptions in Hervey Cleckley’s classic The Mask of Sanity.
Patrick is the one-eyed king in his
self-made land of the blind. He sucker-punches his young and easily
impressionable flock with logical fallacies which make him sound wise and
caring. Yet like I Corinthians’ ‘sounding brass, or a tinkling symbol,’ he has
not charity. The community he fosters is the common delusion in which they
reinforce each other. Patrick gives M3 the name Marcy May when she tells him
her name is Martha, just as later he calls a new initiate Sally when she
introduces herself as Sarah (Julia Garner).
His special power lies in his gift for intuitively homing on and manipulating others’ weaknesses, even divining their potential insecurities and creating weaknesses. Patrick has no equals, only followers. Katie (Maria Dizzia), his elder woman enforcer, would not have been out of place supervising concentration camp guards.
The movie this work brings to mind is the Austrian director Götz Spielmann’s 2008 Revanche (Revenge), which likewise calmly relates an intense story with great acting under the steady gaze of a camera and nature’s sounds of silence.
The DVD set includes Mary Last Seen (2010) a fifteen-minute feature also written and directed by Sean Durkin on the theme of a man (Brady Corbet) bringing an unwitting young woman (Stephanie Estes) from New York City into a rural communal cult.
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