Sucked in by Rotten Tomatoes again....
Okay, I get it. This movie is meant to
keep you on your toes, guessing about what you are seeing (and when)
and never really letting you get your feet under you. But come on
now, hasn't anyone ever heard of continuity?
Martha (played by Elizabeth Olsen, sister of the Olsen twins) is a young and vulnerable girl
who somehow (it is never shown how) comes to be living at a farmhouse
in upstate New York with a bunch of utter weirdos. When she first
arrives everything is sunshine and rainbows with the group living
communally, trying to farm and live pretty much off the grid. At
first there are just a handful of men and women, living happily and peacefully, but after a couple
of years there are a lot more women than men. Patrick, the leader of
the group (played menacingly by John Hawkes), is a master manipulator
and creepy as hell; I have an idea they were really going for a
Manson parallel, with his whole “death is beautiful” and “cease to
exist” ideologies. But he has “his girls” systematically drug
newcomers so he can rape them, and then use the group mentality to
make it all seem like some great love story.
After some time, needing more than the
farm can provide for sustenance, they begin breaking into local
cottages and stealing food and valuables. This results in their
eventually murder of a homeowner who catches them. Patrick then
suggests to the frightened Martha that they did him a favour, moving him along to the next plane
of existence.
Make no mistake – despite their calm and reasoned manner, these are some sick
puppies.
Much of this is told to us in Martha's flashbacks, which normally I enjoy as a storytelling device but here is overused to the point of often leaving the watcher confused. You never know if what you're seeing is real, or when it happened. Martha's damaged emotional state adds to this lack of continuity as she often hallucinates, clearly still suffering from Patrick's influence. When her sister rescues her following her escape from the cult and brings her to her husband's Connecticut lake house, we are often given the impression that the cult has followed her there, but we can never be sure.
So that's the basic background, and it
sounds interesting enough to watch – I thought so too. But the
film suffers from one basic problem – every character in it, with
the exception of the very damaged Martha, is a complete and utter jackass. The
cult members (for reasons I need not explain) are all terrible human
beings, and Martha's sister and her husband (played by
Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy) are in many ways worse. Having come
from the sparse living conditions of the farm, Martha has trouble
understanding their well-to-do lifestyle with an enormous house,
oppulent parties and accumulated wealth. And though Martha is clearly very wounded
and suffering her sister shows little compassion, hoping she'll
self-correct or allow herself to be stuck in an institution. The brother-in-law is even worse, so wrapped up in his own lifestyle that he
finds Martha an unneeded nuisance, and he wants to rid himself of her
as soon as humanly possible.
I admit that I am a greedy movie watcher – there
are certain things I need in order to really enjoy a film. One of those
things is someone to root for, and I couldn't find one here.
Martha is unbalanced, and everyone else is flat-out detestable. Add to
that the movie's glacial pace, and you have a film that really isn't
very interesting watching. I wouldn't be going out on a limb to call it a
snore, and by the end I didn't particularly care if Martha will make it or
not. It has nice reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and great praise for Olsen's performance, but I just can't recommend the film.
Spoiler Alert: The paragraph below
discusses the ending. If you don't want to know how this ends, stop
here. If you need a sleep aid this movie will definitely do the
trick, so you can see what you missed below.
The ending did have a compelling
feature. The sister and her husband are taking Martha “into the
city” to institutionalize her. Just before leaving, Martha goes
for a swim and sees a man watching her from the other side of the
lake. This man looks a lot like Patrick. Did she really see him or
was it another hallucination? They leave the house and out on the
road a man (that we don't see) runs in front of their car, nearly
being hit. Then as they drive away, we see the man from behind
running to his truck (also appearing to be Patrick's truck) and
coming up behind to follow them closely. Fade to black. Was it Patrick? Is he
following, or is his intention more sinister? Is the filmmaker suggesting Patrick is making his move to take her back (or possibly kill her if unsuccessful)? A compelling ending to
be sure. Too bad you had to slog through 90 minutes of tedium to get
there.
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