Martha Marcy May Marlene
A young woman who has fled an abusive rural cult takes refuge with her sister, but cannot tell the past from the present or trust that she is safe.
Sundance Directing Award 2011 won
Having escaped a controlling commune in the Catskills, a young woman turns up at her estranged sister's lake house, giving no account of where she has been. As she tries to resume ordinary life, the film moves between her memories of the cult and the present, until the two begin to bleed together and her fear that she is being followed grows.
The film is a precise study of a self fragmented by coercion and abuse, with dissociation and paranoia collapsing trauma into the here and now. For a clinician it shows how the aftermath of captivity refuses to stay in the past. It won the Directing Award at Sundance in 2011.
Details
- 2011
- United States
- English
- Film