Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes, Sarah Paulson, Hugh Dancy
Rating: (R16)
Four stars (out of five)
With an estimated 5000 cults in the US alone, it's surprising that more films don't tax the debilitating tropes of deception, control, and fear as templates for psychological thrillers.
Visually conveying the mental state of someone who has lost connection with their rational mind is not an easy task. Here, writer-director Sean Durkin has pretty much nailed it.
Younger sister to the famous older twins, Elizabeth Olsen steps out from their shadow to deliver a knockout performance as Martha, a young woman struggling with sanity after running away from a hippie cult.
Martha phones her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) out of the blue, asking her for help. What is not divulged to Lucy, her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) or the viewer, are the exact circumstances of Martha's involvement with the cult and their messianic leader Patrick (John Hawkes).
Rather, this important fact is an itch that we are left to scratch for the entire film. Martha's frequent lapses into painful memory are the cues that Durkin uses to slip between the present and her abusive past. Olsen's tortured vulnerability is hard to ignore as you implore the screen to give up more information.
Meanwhile, Lucy and Ted prove not only ill-equipped to help Marcy, but so caught up in their upper-middle-class lives, they fail to ask the right questions.
All the classic elements of cult control are laid bare, as we get a sense of how Martha was originally enticed, only to one day wake up and find herself enslaved to Patrick's sinister urges.
Best thing: Visually portraying Martha's tortured psychological state.
Worst thing: The frustrating ending.
See it with: An understanding of how cult mind-control techniques work.
- MARK ORTON
