Marta pieces Martha has four names, but no last name. It's like there's never been any roots that connect her to her sister Lucy. Only two years have passed since their breakup, and now Martha, who lost herself, joins the well-established and successful couple Lucy and Ted in a large house on the shore of a beautiful lake. Who a few days ago in a completely different life were called Marcy, Marcy May, Marlene.
Director Sean Darkin, in his expressive debut, cuts through Martha’s past, leaving the viewer alone with two years of her stay in a quasi-religious commune and the heavy semi-sleep of the next few days of life with Lucy. Even in ideal conditions for rest and recovery, Martha does not find herself, constantly immersed in hypnotic-heavy memories.
"You look like Marcy May." Patrick, the leader of the commune, looks at the fragile girl with a cunning squint, as if saying her secret name. And after a while with "Marcy's Song" prompts you to adopt a new image of a tall stranger, hiding mysterious symbols and deep meanings. Having changed at one moment the clothes of the past to a symbolically clean white T-shirt, consciousness instantly absorbs a murky stream of ideas of the death of civilization and the natural life of the elect, which dissolved in itself the poison of accepting violence in drugs as the most beautiful moment of a new existence.
By cultivating the seeds of repressed pain daily, memory gives abundant sprouts to the thorns of self-destruction. In the dark corners of the rooms, on the verge of reality and sleep, the ghosts of the past are thorned into the very first shoots of Martha's return to herself, giving rise to the disturbing question: "Is this the past or the present?" Meanwhile, untouched by centuries, the nature of the outback of Connecticut does not want to distinguish Martha from Marcy, allowing the depth of water and the smell of the earth to equally accept both.
In his interview, Darkin marveled at how quickly self-renunciation can occur, born of a normal desire to be part of something bigger. And the magnificent play of the charismatic Elizabeth Olsen demonstrates how impassable the return road can be.
8 out of 10
Original