Audience empathizes with former cult member in ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’
Your family isn’t there for you, the world has nothing to offer you and you’ve lost all hope. But while you feel like you’ve hit rock bottom you run into a group of friendly people who take you in. They live on a self-sustaining farm and call you family. They give you a job to do, a bed to sleep in–even if you have to share it with a room full of people–and they teach you about everything that’s wrong with the world. Sounds great right? Well it’s not. You’ve just unknowingly entered into a cult!
The leaders brainwash the members to get them to do whatever they want. This involves rape of the mind and the body. Also, this “self-sustaining” farm isn’t going as well as planned and now that the members have been brainwashed, they must help the leaders of the cult break into homes and steal the things they need to survive. Oh, and if someone catches you, you have to kill them… So now you have murder on your hands!
At this point, your average cult member is probably thinking, “whoa, I just wanted to have a family and do some farming, I never wanted to lie, cheat and steal! I’ve gotta get out of here!”
This is where we find Martha, played by the amazingly talented and beautiful Elizabeth Olson, in the film Martha Marcy May Marlene. The film begins with Mary leaving a cult then interweaves the story with how she is coping in the real world versus how she lived on the farm. In his debut as a feature director, Sean Durkin puts the audience in the shoes of someone exiting a cult. Mary feels a great deal of tension and apprehension after leaving the farm and Durkin does an amazing job of showing it.
Durkin really makes the audience empathize with Mary. You feel what she feels and ask yourself the same questions that Mary has after exiting the cult. She is uneasy and so are you. A great deal of tension is felt throughout the film which makes this a great movie to watch in theaters. Everyone watching seems to be waiting for what’s going to happen next. This film is also an eye-opening view into the very real world of cults.
Durkin worked on this script for several years; he studied cults and interviewed ex-cult members to create a story as close to reality (without actually entering into a cult) as possible. He purposely built a sense of ambiguity into the film and the films ending. Someone who has been in a cult may take years to readjust, if they readjust at all. Because those people may never have closure, Durkin left the audience guessing, which was a great move.
