Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) on Netflix
Martha escapes the cult that renamed her Marcy May and calls her estranged sister Lucy, who takes her to a Connecticut lake house. Lucy's husband Ted tolerates her strange behavior.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb6.8/1059,015 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
Martha, who is twenty-two, has spent two years with a cult in the Catskill Mountains, where its patriarch, Patrick, renamed her Marcy May. She runs into the woods and reaches a nearby town, and in a diner Watts, a cult member, tries to persuade her to come back. She refuses and he lets her go. Martha calls her sister, Lucy, who drives her to the Connecticut lake house Lucy shares with her husband, Ted, an architect. Martha says only that she had been living with a boyfriend upstate. She sleeps through the days, eats little, swims without clothes in view of others, and argues with Lucy and Ted about careers and possessions. Lucy does not press her about what happened, wanting to give her only sibling support and love.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sean Durkin started writing the script in 2007 and researched what he calls 'the big ones' of cults: Jonestown, the Manson family, the Unification Church and David Koresh. He then downplayed the cult's ideology to make something more experiential than political.
- Before the feature, Durkin made a short film called Mary Last Seen, starring Brady Corbet, who plays the cult recruiter Watts in both. The short won the award for best short film at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival Directors' Fortnight.
- Elizabeth Olsen said that diving into the water was far more perilous than taking her clothes off in front of a camera: the lake was daunting, and some lake scenes could only be shot once because it was too cold for a body to stay in the water.
- Durkin and cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes drew on Rosemary's Baby, 3 Women, Klute, Interiors and Margot at the Wedding, with the look of the film particularly inspired by the last of those.
