Martha Marcy May Marlene
2011
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
Elizabeth Olsen's career best performance comes out of a film 15 years ago, about deprogramming done cold-turkey and the PTSD that follows, directed flawlessly by Sean Durkin. Martha Marcy May Marlene isn't quite as gruesome or as unbelievable as The Ant Hill Kids but it puts too fine a point of the gradual progression of how non-exciting and uneventful the whole "groom 'em while they're young" for a cult thing gets. In a slow pervasive way it brainwashes until the victim has no idea how mudane menial chores become the routine rituals of the entire process. Elizabeth Olsen has this lingering shadow of a halo following her husk of a self around and at first I couldn't put my finger on the air around her disposition and then it struck me it's strikingly similar to what Brie Larson was going for in Room. Of course, where this one stands out is how calmly yet at times disturbingly it dissects the colliding viewpoints for or against having a commune style life vis-a-vis the whole picket fence nuclear family domestic bliss and why in the first place is it that often the people that are surrounded by dysfunctional family with a dearth of genuine connection gravitate towards a false sense of affection, purpose and warmth a close-knit detached solitary cult provides, which in most of the cases, as it happens to be the big selling point. A perfect breeding ground to fall prey to, a neat trap to get yourself ensnared. But, what amazed me the most was the depiction of her lost sense of any vitality and normalcy due a warped construct of behavior; taboo or otherwise and how a guru-like figure can easily shape that kind of self-sustainable heinous system which in return churns out one victim after another by internalizing the twisted mode of reassurance and a corrupt view of rationalizing. The only mechanism of coping remains is curling up into a ball and reverting to being a small child. Brutally insidious and simultaneously fascinating to watch the healing process with this kind of fresh portrayal of societal adjustment through frustratingly painful and confusing recalibration of life. All in all, could be a comfort movie for the Red Pill community. If not for the Manson family reenactment, it would've been a full five star.