Thursday, 8 November 2012

Martha Marcy May Marlene



This eery and menacing psychological thriller will have you clinging to the edge of your seat (or the nearest person). It's more psychologically challenging than 'scary' and isn't dissimilar in style to 2010's Winter's Bone, having both been filmed in isolated forestry in central America and being focused on the lives of tormented and troubled teenage girls.
    Martha's sister, after recieving a desperate and discouraging phone call from Martha immediately comes to her aid and picks her up from an unknown isolated location. After going back to Martha's sisters house, it's revealed she lives with her British husband - who doesn't approve of Martha's increasingly disturbing behaviour when she arrives back with her sister - having lied about where she was staying for years to her sister when she was in fact living with a crime focused destructive cult. It's easy to observe how difficult she's finding coming to terms with whatever has happened to her - which is always kept ambiguous to a certain extent, even though we are shown certain selections of her memories. It's clear Martha is really mentally affected by the things which happened in those years when she went away - the whole way through the film the narrative is revealed to us by her flashbacks, putting us in her mindset - in places it's difficult to differentiate which is a past memory and which is present - mirroring Martha's mindset. After Martha partakes in particular activities, they persistently reveal flashbacks of both mental and physical abuse during the time she was with this cult. The things she experienced, to us, are downright bizarre and completely socially unacceptable, but with an extreme brainwashing by the cult, Martha finds herself copying many of the insane behaviours when she escapes and is constantly paranoid that people are coming to get her. We're led to believe this concerns Marcy's sister a great deal, also being paired with Martha's silence and restraint also emphasises her fragile mental state and creates an enigma for us to solve. We're left with an extremely ambiguous ending. Overall, definitely worth a watch, not the film for you if you're not good with ambiguity though!

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