Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) is a seemingly typical 20-something girl. Struggling to find her identity in the world and dealing with unknown family problems she falls in with a commune of people who she believes will take care of her. However as the film unravels, it peels the layers away and gives us glimpses of the commune’s sinister, cultish leanings.
MMMM is a very impressive debut film from director Sean Durkin. A thriller disguised as a drama, it’s dark inner leanings boil slowly up to the surface as the film goes on. Durkin uses restraint extremely well throughout the film. At times it feels as if it could have easily fallen into schlocky horror exploitation territory, but Durkin instead decides to splice together Martha’s struggle to reintegrate herself into her sister Lucy’s (Sarah Paulson) upper-class normal life and her integration into the cult.
The film has a lot going for it, with a fantastic cast led by the previously mentioned Olsen, along with John Hawkes as the cult leader Patrick. He plays a rather calm but also deeply terrifying character, who displays his power among the cult by renaming all of the women himself and carrying out ritualistic rape when he chooses to, which the elder women of the cult refer to as cleansing’. His anger only comes to the fore in a few scenes, but you can’t help but feel his dark side throughout.
The film uses parallels and contrasts throughout, cutting between the present and Martha’s past seamlessly, giving the film an often dreamlike quality. This may be a subtle form of showing Martha’s loss of reality and fall into paranoid delusions. The film’s themes also fantastically contrast with a heavy palette of gold and yellow, which increase the picturesque ideals when in fact something much darker and more sinister is going on beneath the surface.
As MMMM continues, Martha’s paranoia and social detachment from the real world start to show, starting off as simple acts such as having no social inhibitions when she jumps happily into a public lake in the nude, to Martha walking in on Lucy and her husband having sex. Martha never tells Lucy and her husband what actually happened at the cult, making it extremely hard for them to understand what is going on, but Olsen plays the character so well you can see the pain and torture in her eyes.
Some people may find the ambiguity of the film a little hard, especially the ending, but it feels as if closure was given, the film would have been unsatisfying. Sometimes it works to leave the audience scratching their heads as the credits role.
The Blu-ray transfer is good, feeling very crisp despite the cheap format that the movie was filmed on. The sound is good, although in several scenes the dialogue is muffled on purpose, so don’t adjust your sets! The special features are chock full of featurettes and Durkin’s prologue to MMMM, Mary Last Seen.
Overall Verdict: A fantastically dark cult movie, brilliantly acted by the entire cast and a promising debut from both director Sean Durkin and, as an adult, serious actress, Elizabeth Olsen. That’s said, the film’s ambiguity may be a little hard for some.
Special Features:
Mary Last Seen
Spotlight on Elizabeth Olsen
Featurette: The Story
Featurette: The Psyche of a cult
Marcy’s Song Music Video
A conversation with the filmmakers
Theatrical trailer
Reviewer: Gareth Haworth