Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Sgt. Schultz This movie is simply a mildly altered version of the Manson story. Everything that happens in the cult is almost precisely what went on with Manson. And Olsen's "mesmerizing" performance? Well she simply pouts the entire movie. So if that's your idea of brilliant acting...Worst, there is no ending. It's almost as if they ran out of budget at 4:15 PM, or their camera's hard drive filled up so they stopped.So all in all it's totally unoriginal, incomplete & ultimately uninteresting. Skip it & read Bugliosi's book instead. Or, if you want to see a truly gripping movie about being sucked in & then pulled out of a cult, watch "Ticket to Heaven".

LittleFerdinand Elizabeth Olsen was unbelievably good in this film. We get to see more about the cause behind Martha May's unstable state of mind in as the story progresses. The psychological destruction wrought by the cult has made her paranoid and she has never been the same after escaping from an abusive cult. Throughout the picture, we get flashbacks showing glimpses of Marcy May's introduction into the cult's world, as a new recruit, she was prepped for the horrific initiation ritual that each of them experience. Lot of these scenes were unsettling, it was like watching Dogtooth. John Hawkes pulled it off as a creepy cult leader. He controls and manipulates young women, telling them just enough to allow them to rationalize what's happening. The cult leader brainwashed his "girls" to see the world in black and white where he encouraged them to commit terrible crimes.It's no wonder Martha has put up walls around her (metaphorically speaking) because she feels threatened all the time and lacks social etiquette as a result of being harassed by the cult. When she escapes to her sister's place. She had a hard time recovering and has a completely warped overview of the outside world that even they couldn't completely help her. We get flashbacks showing glimpses of Marcy May's introduction into the cult's world and her leery character is flawlessly captured on screen by Lizzie Olsen. It's about how Martha's pretense of normality begins to fade as time passes and her sister wasn't being very helpful in bossing around her telling her to get a job and pushing her over the edge. She has been through a lot and her sister has no clue that she was an emotionally broken woman who needs all the help she can get to forget her past but instead ends up making it worse for her. And it is not too long before she becomes hopelessly paranoid to a point where she attacked a person at a party she thought was back to haunt her. Lizzie has brilliantly depicted the confused and emotionally-scarred Martha May and she deserve more credit for her role because it appears like she put in a lot of effort to bring this character to life. Lizzie is definitely the best actresses around and I hope she plays in more thriller dramas like this. Elizabeth is one of the very few remarkable actresses in mainstream cinema who would make our heads turn. This film would be nothing short of a masterpiece if they had given it a proper ending for Martha rather than a "the past is back to bite you in the ass" cliffhanger ending. Other than that, its a good slow paced thriller.

rowmorg What hell it must be, to be a hot girl when there's no one to take care of you. Particularly if you find your way into a cultish group on a farm where people seem to have taken leave of their common sense. They have group sex, produce boy-children indiscriminately, and occasionally kill living creatures, animal and human, with no associated emotion. The titular heroine, being a beauteous hottie, is ruthlessly shagged by all the men until her loins must ache and her mind is bending. At last she escapes, and one of the fellows who has been having her, finds her in the local town, lazily snacking on hotcakes. He then leaves her there, and she manages to call her long-lost sister, who drives three hours to fetch her. This is where she starts to become defined as mad, because of her misfit behaviour (swimming nude, joining her sister in bed while her sister is getting noisily shafted). Finally, in a fit, she kicks her brother- in-law down the stairs and tells her sister she would make a lousy mother. The couple decide to take her into town with them and get her treatment. At the end, as they are driving into town, someone seems to take over the car, and she sees the cult leader's big black SUV behind her. End: yes, we are abandoned by the film-maker as the action is just about to start, and we realise we have been watching the preliminaries only, not the real film. I'd like to see Elizabeth Olsen again, it's so nice when a talented actress also has breasts, (as any reader of my reviews will know). She carries this film, but it's a heavy load. Not recommended.

Mr-Fusion With "Martha Marcy May Marlene", there's a pervasive sense of foreboding right out of the gate. I really wanted to know what happened to Martha at that cult farm. But the bigger question that nagged throughout the movie (which is never really answered) is what drove her there in the first place? That's what was so frustrating because the movie offered very little in the way of answers. And the flip-flopping between past and present got old rather quickly. Alas, aside from Elizabeth Olsen's terrifically haunting performance, it's the frustration that sticks with me more than anything else. While this movie is great at setting the eerie vibe and leaving one completely unnerved, it's not one that I particularly want to revisit.5/10