[Apologies for leaving my Cannes coverage in limbo as I unwound in Paris before returning to London housekeeping. A handful of films from my festival viewing roster are still owed some discussion in grouped capsule form, and I’ll get to those this weekend — hey, the films aren’t going anywhere, so why stick to the parameters of the festival diary? I’ll begin, however, with the last of my individual reviews from this year’s Cannes, and the last of my three four-star finds of the fest.]
Elizabeth Olsen’s face is an ellipsis, a perturbingly lovely marker of concerns unspoken and unresolved, in writer-director Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” a sharp blackberry winter of a debut feature that perhaps invites a re-evaluation of how we define the modern horror film. Little happens in the course of Durkin’s curtly time-shifting narrative that is definably horrific, yet the constricting rhythms of the editing combine with the between-the-lines anxiousness of Olsen’s performance to instil a kind of objectless dread in the audience, playing their preconceptions of the film’s sensationalistic subject matter against its own craftier revelations. Watching it, in short, feels like being slowly strangled from behind.