Martha Marcey May Marlene

I cannot stop thinking about this movie. D and I watched it just this past Tuesday. It has legs. I don't want to say much about the plot. The plot isn't the point and I don't want to ruin a bit of it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. It got a lot of attention when it first came out--a movie about a young woman who joins a cult and then is rescued by her estranged sister.

What's so disconcerting about this film for me is that the setting of the whole film reminds me of huge happy swathes of my life--my family's farm in Cleves, OH, the seven years I spent in Athens, OH, vacations in Maine. And so much of the film could be happy and has all of the markers of usual summer splendor--sun glinting off a lake, having a beer on the back of small speed boat, reading in adirondack chairs at the edge of a pier, the slant of sunlight through dust kicked up while working in a barn, young folks long-limbed and attentive listening to their friends playing acoustic music, skinny dipping in a wooded creek, everything green on green as far as the eye can see rustling in a warm wind. It's the summer I've been dreaming of ever since I first started having to work all year round.

And despite all of that, it's a horror movie. And that was a sense I didn't have until it was over, as if while watching it, my mind kept trying to resolve the story, kept trying to fix the narrative to go with the sensation that the visuals of the movie were giving me. But it's a horror movie, and the first one that I have ever seen that is 99% psychologically horrifying. There's almost no blood whatsoever and there is certainly no gore.

Four days later, I haven't been able to shake it. I keep thinking about who I am and if there's any way that I could have been the lead character, Martha. I don't think so, but it's hard to know. . . and frankly, in the end, I don't want to. I'd just prefer to stop thinking about it.

Rent this movie immediately, just please don't watch it with anyone under the age of 13. This would be a rough one to explain to young people. . . though probably a good one to explain to young women sometime in their teens as a cautionary tale. *shudder.



Written and Directed by Sean Durkin and starring Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes and Sarah Paulson.