Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha arrives at the Connecticut home of her older sister Lucy, who she has not seen in years, after fleeing the cult-like community where she had been living. She is taken in by Lucy and her husband Ted, but she cannot bring herself to explain where she has been or what happened to her there. Memories of her time in the group, and of its manipulative leader, intrude on her attempts to settle into an ordinary life, and her fear that the community is still looking for her gradually hardens into paranoia, blurring the line between what is real and what she only imagines.

The 2011 drama and thriller was the feature debut of writer-director Sean Durkin, who later made The Nest and The Iron Claw. Elizabeth Olsen plays Martha, with Sarah Paulson as Lucy, Hugh Dancy as Ted and John Hawkes as Patrick; Brady Corbet and Louisa Krause appear in supporting roles. The film was produced with a budget of about one million US dollars and took roughly four million dollars worldwide.

Opinion divides along the expected lines: critics rated it strongly, at 7.8/10 from 210 reviews, while audiences were cooler, with 6.8/10 on IMDb from over fifty-five thousand votes and 6.6/10 on TMDB from several hundred. The gap suggests a film that reviewers found more accomplished than general viewers did.