Martha Marcy May Marlene - short film review

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1329708288/tt1441326

You know the strange feeling that you have when your head is submerged in water; you’re either in the bath or in the sea. Your body is floating lightly and all exterior sounds are dulled to the point where you can no longer decipher what's being said. If you open your eyes forms in front and all around you are also distorted. Indeed, the world, at least for the time you are immersed has changed. Twice in Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, 2011) there are underwater scenes in which Martha’s body is distorted and this exemplifies her fragile psychology disturbed by haunting past events presented in flash-back sequences that tease us with perception and reality. This film, which had the potential to be better than it was relied upon a stylistic device that framed the scenes in wide-angel rather than close-up in order to create a feeling of unease, and it did that until  it became familiar (and for me that was quite soon after the film began), which is not to say that this kind of camera work has no merit. It does. However, with all its good acting and stylistic cleverness the film fell short, not only because of its abrupt ending, which only reinforced what we already knew, that the main protagonist Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) was paranoid after absconding from an abusive hippy cult, but that the angst that she was obviously experiencing was never as intense as it might have been. One of the biggest problems I had with the film was the notion that her behavior was crazy – at one point she strips naked to swim in a lake and later lies down on the bed when her sister and brother-in-law are having sex - unconventional perhaps, but NOT crazy! One might expect given what she experienced in the two years with the cult that her demeanor might be more disruptive and shocking. Instead, her calm, almost detached persona appears to typify her total inculcation into cult ideas, such as ‘death is love’, that forced sex with the cult leader was ‘part of the cleansing’ and that she was ‘a teacher and a leader’. Whilst watching this film we can become vigilant about Martha’s deteriorating psychology when in fact the film painfully shows the coercive and destructive behavior of the male cult leader, mirrored in the actions of her brother-in-law who wants a certain amount of power over the women (his wife and Martha) who live ‘in his house and eat his food’. I saw this film earlier today at the Rivoli Cinema and believe that although some films suffer from being too lengthy, this film may have been improved by being extended from its 102 minutes.