Martha Marcy May Marlene

Poster of Martha Marcy May Marlene

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Released 2011

This is an independent film which made a splash at the Sundance Festival and won accolades for its star, Elizabeth Olsen (sister of the famous twins).

A young woman, Martha (Olsen), escapes from a cult and is taken in by her estranged older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson).  As Lucy tries to understand the strange behaviour and haunted manner of her uncommunicative sister, the story is told in flashbacks to Martha’s time with the cult, cutting back to her awkward adjustment to Lucy’s upper-middle-class lifestyle.

I thought the film did a good job of first showing some unsavory aspects of the cult (living in poverty, women being totally subservient to the men) and then showing why it might have appealed to a lost soul like Martha.  Elizabeth Olsen is a very natural actor, but I wasn’t blown away, since haunted/crazy isn’t generally that hard to do.

This movie was building up to a 3-star rating, until it suddenly ended without any kind of resolution.  When stories end like that, it always makes me suspect that the writer could not figure out a good ending and so decided to leave it up to the audience to figure one out for themselves.  There are rare instances when the story is actually better served by an ambiguous ending, but most of the time (as in this one) it just feels like laziness.