Review of the film Martha Marcy May Marlene

 "I don't blame you for not trusting people."*

    Martha has every right to not trust anyone. But the real issue is she is also questioning whether she can trust herself. And this latter mistrust is so much more terrifying than the first could ever be. The things she remembers, did they really happen the way her memory tells her they did? And if she can't trust her memories, then can she be sure that any experience now is real as well? It all seems dreamy - hazy - and the smallest detail of the present will send her mind spinning backwards - so that it can be hard to distinguish where she is, who she is with, and what is truly occurring in this moment.
    In the film Martha Marcy May Marlene, the plot drifts, and sometimes leaps, from the present to the past with little or no cue. And viewers slowly are immersed in the mind-space of the title character, a young woman who ran from a troubled childhood to a place she thought would give her comfort and safety. Yet, that place, a small, isolated upstate farm that may or not be a misanthropic cult run by a scarily charismatic and seductive male leader, reveals itself as something Martha must run away from as well. But whether she has truly escaped is open to interpretation throughout the narrative.

"Do you ever have that feeling where you can't tell if something is a memory or something you dreamed?"*

     Having sought refuge with her older, estranged sister in a huge, lake-side mansion, Martha wanders through the riffing of her mind like a sleep-walker - unsure of where that thin line between dream and reality exists. There are beautiful moments from the farm - in which Martha works side by side with the other women in the fields, listens to a young man strum a guitar and hum through the lines of an improvised song, and smells the bald head of a newborn baby. And there are frightening moments - of strange, misogynistic rituals, drugged herbal teas and foggy periods of forgetfulness mixed with searing pain, and whispered, veiled threats and actual acts of violence. But there enters for Martha that mistrust again, of herself, of what her mind is telling her happened, and if that could possibly have been true. 
    A slow and terrifyingly realistic film, Martha Marcy May Marlene is a superb psychological thriller featuring amazing performances. And images that sear on the brain with eerie beauty. It all feels like it could have happened - or maybe not at all.

*dialogue from the film