My gut tells me that a great pun would be to call Martha Marcy May Marlene by the alternate name Martha Marcy Meh Marlene, but there are a number of objections to that, among them being that it's not quite as bad as being "meh", another that your eye tends to glide over the words to fast to notice it, and the most important being that Baby Jesus hates puns. But I think this digression (and I haven't even started the review yet!) is enough to make my feelings on the movie clear, which is that despite a deafening raft of buzz out of Sundance - though hopefully we're all too smart to assume that Sundance buzz has anything but an incidental relationship to a film's quality - MMMM is sort of really damn typical, and the much-ballyhooed performance by Elizabeth Olsen as the title character has perhaps more to do with people's shock that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen came from genetic stock capable of also producing a perfectly good actress rather than anything illuminating about the performance itself. But let us not judge gloomy Sundance indies too harshly for the crime of being gloomy Sundance indies, however dodgy that category tends to be.

Things start off in cozily ambiguous fashion: a young woman (Olsen) creeps out of a rundown white house in the woods. Another young woman observes her, and alerts a young man, who runs into the woods after her. In the nearby town, he catches up with her, and seems to buy her massively unconvincing story about why she snuck out; this gives here the opportunity to call a woman and tearily ask for help. In due course, the girl, Martha, has traveled from a little nowhere corner of upstate New York to a tony vacation community in Connecticut, where her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson) is spending a few weeks with her new husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy). Through a series of mostly chronological flashbacks, we are acquainted with the past two years of Martha's live, during which she was absorbed into a cult overseen by the not-so-charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes), given the nom du culte "Marcy May"*, and trained in a lifestyle that is, for the most part, not dissimilar from the well-intentioned post-hippie philosophy of any given dreadlocked pothead in college, only with more man-on-girl anal rape. Also, armed robbery of rich people.

Martha's recovery is awfully painful, and results in a lot of baiting Lucy and Ted with the undergrad Marxism she picked up from Patrick's teachings, and flouting the basic rules of polite society out of a combination of malice and addled confusion about what codes apply to what situations. Also, her ability to trust people has been well and truly fucked as a result of her cult experience, and so, rather than respond to Lucy's repeated pleas to explain what the hell happened (her sister and brother-in-law never, in point of fact, learn what happened), Martha descends further and further into her own mind and paranoia.

Here's the deal: The M&M Show is a very good version of itself (though not the best possible version of itself), namely a film that explores in some considered detail a young woman's broken sense of self after two years in a warm, friendly extended family that is full of batshit crazy loons. And that is the only thing it is. I hesitate to resort to such a trite, unhelpful turn of phrase, but there's not much of a point to any of these: no underlying sense of human psychology, no catharsis, nothing that speaks to the world outside of the movie itself. We never get even the slightest idea of who Martha was before her indoctrination, and thus we never, ultimately, get a sense of who she is or what she's lost, only that, at this moment in time, she's suffering rather mightily. That's not the stuff of great drama or tragedy; it's the stuff of hip miserabilism, and M4 is the sort of indie whose single goal is to make you feel so bad when it's done that you must have just seen something good.

The film obviously wants to fill the same niche as Winter's Bone, and be the geographically precise study of a nasty backwoods cultured anchored by a groundbreaking female lead and John Hawkes as a scary supporting actor, but it's nowhere near as intelligent as that film was, nor as pictorially excellent, it does not have anything meaningful to say about the culture it depicts beyond "cults! boy, they sure are rapey!" and Hawkes, beyond his terrifyingly lanky skeleton arms, is operating on a much lower level of intensity than before.

Aside from being shallow to an almost criminal degree, though, the film is actually pretty much okay: Sean Durkin, in his feature directorial debut (expanded from a short film) makes his share of obvious mistakes, but on the whole, Martha &c is honestly pretty snappy. Over-directed, beyond a doubt: Durkin's use of "clever" graphic matches to tie the two timelines together is eye-rolling as frequently as it is cunning, but at least it demonstrates a certain thoughtfulness about how to structure the narrative such that it's simultaneously clear, while also permitting the story of Martha's cult life to have its own concrete three-act arc instead of just being the prologue to her recovery (indeed, the fact that Durkin's screenplay is, basically, two three-act structures that move forward in roughly the same beats is almost certainly the most interesting detail about the whole film.

And while Elizabeth Olsen's star-marking turn isn't remotely as good as we've all been told - she does absolutely nothing to flesh a one- and sometimes two-dimensional role into a flesh and blood human, nor does she indicate any hint of a hidden backstory beyond what the script provides - the actress, like her director, seems to have a sort of wild talent that promises to end in some very good things in the future. "So much promise!" is a kind of lame response to have to a story that tries to say so much, but then, Martha Marcy May Marlene is a kind of lame movie, and and promise is what it has to do with instead of actual, tangible results.