Elizabeth Olsen (left) and Sarah Paulson in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,”… (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
At the start of 2010, Elizabeth Olsen was just another student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a kid with dreams of an acting career.
A year later, she had two premieres at the Sundance Film Festival – and one of them, Martha Marcy May Marlene, won the best director prize. Two films at Sundance, and three more in the can, including a comedy with Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener (Peace, Love & Misunderstanding) and a thriller, shot in Spain, with Cillian Murphy and Robert De Niro (Red Lights).
“I’ve been incredibly lucky,” says Olsen, younger sister to the famous child stars and fashionista twins Mary-Kate and Ashley.
But also incredibly good. In Martha Marcy May Marlene, the first of Olsen’s marathon run of titles to be released, she plays a young woman who falls into a cult, and whose experiences there – and afterward, when she seeks refuge in the lakeside house of her sister and brother-in-law – can only be described as chilling. It’s a stunning performance, deep and indrawn and full of telling silences, as this lost soul struggles with disorientation and dread after a traumatic event.
There’s a line Olsen says in the film – “Do you ever have that feeling where you can’t tell if something’s a memory, or if it’s something you dreamed?” – that neatly sums up her character’s state of mind.
Olsen, 22, dropped into Philadelphia along with Martha Marcy’s writer/director, Sean Durkin, in late August – on the day the city, and the whole Northeast, was rocked by an earthquake. (The interview took place a few hours before the magnitude 5.8 jolt.) Martha Marcy screens Monday in the “American Independents” section of the Philadelphia Film Festival and begins its regular run Friday at the Ritz Five and Rave Motion Pictures at the Ritz Center/NJ.
Durkin, also out of NYU (but a few years ahead of his leading lady), knew he had found his star when Olsen walked in for her audition – one of the last of about 75 actresses to read for the role. He wanted to make a movie about cults without ever saying the word; the scenes at a Catskills commune, where a charismatic hippie type (Winter’s Bone’s John Hawkes) sings folk songs and messes with his followers’ heads (and with the females’ bodies), are shot in a low-key, naturalistic style. Durkin needed someone who could look lost in this setting, but not get lost on the screen.
