Flick of The Day: Martha Marcy May Marlene

The Sundance Film Festival has over the years acted as the big break for a generation of young American filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh. While it has in many ways abandoned its Indie roots for more mainstream fare, it is still a respected venue to launch a career.  Today's flick of the day is a winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year's festival and the directing award for first time director Sean Durkin.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the world conquering Olsen twins, stars as the Martha of the title, a young woman who as the films opens is attempting to escape from the cult where she has lived for the past two years isolated from her family. She makes contact with her well to do sister and architect husband and soon finds herself ensconced in their lakeside summer house. However all is not well, Martha is haunted by her experiences while under the roof of malevolent leader Patrick, played by a superb John Hawkes surpassing his breakout performance in 2010's Winter's Bone. As her behaviour becomes more erratic, she pushes her hosts to breaking point and we learn in every more horrifying flashbacks the nature of her captivity and sexual servitude. All the while the tension mounts and Martha's paranoia about being dragged back to her old life becomes all too real.

Shot in a superb naturalistic style, this is a psychological thriller of the highest order. Durkin's choice of soft lighting and close shots give the film a dreamlike quality. This reinforces the haunting nature of the story and specifically the flashback scenes to Martha's time in the cult. Elizabeth Olsen has justly been lauded for her performance which manages to capture both the difficulty of adapting to life on the outside and the unsettling fear that everything is about to come crashing down around her. This sense of dread pervades the entire film and creates a tension that is never fully resolved.

If it is Olsen's performance which carries the film then it is John Hawkes which moves it to another level. He has created a character that echoes real life self styled messiahs like Charles Manson and David Koresh. Every scene he enters is corrupted by his oily charm which only later reveals itself to be hiding a murderous rage. Perhaps the most chilling scene is the gang's attempted home invasion which is surely influenced by the actions of Manson's Family. The eerie calm before the storm is deeply unsettling and it is a bravura performance. Saying that I do not want to take away from Elizabeth Olsen. She is a natural talent that is surely on the way to bigger things.

An excellent debut from Sean Durkin, this is one of the best films I have seen so far this year. All in all, a definite must see, this is an excellent thriller which makes the most of two fine performances from the leads.

Flick of The Day: Brick

Film Noir is that most stylistic of genres, trading as it does substance and realism for an often rollercoaster ride to the dark side of town. Populated by cynical leading men and a host of seedy underworld characters, it exhibits a bleak view of humanity and arose primarily from the dark underbelly of domestic prosperity in America during the 1940s and 50s. Strictly speaking today's film is Neo-Noir, in that it attempts to recapture the spirit of those films in a modern setting. Brick, written and directed by Rian Johnson, was a big hit at Sundance in 2005.

The film's narrative centers on a hardboiled detective story that takes place in suburbia, specifically that most well travelled of film locations, an American High School. The film draws heavily in plot, characterization, and dialogue from films such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. Suspend your disbelief for a moment and take the story at face value and you will quickly get sucked into a gripping ride with a twist finale. Brendan, played by the then rising star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is the high school loner who has to try and penetrate the upper echelons of the school's social scene and its drug fuelled underbelly when he finds his ex-girlfriend's body in a storm drain, shortly after she made a cryptic call for help.  As always, to find out the true story, you have to watch the film.

This film could so easily have been a train wreck mixing as it does the high school genre and the dark heart of Film Noir however the script is well crafted enough and the leads so obviously enjoying themselves that it pulls it off. As mentioned the film is carried by the performance of its leading man, Jospeh Gordon-Levitt. His character is obviously intelligent, driven by guilt to find out what really happened to the woman he loved. However it's his everyman nature that will keep you caring about what happens to him and his quest for truth.

Shot in only 20 days on a minimal budget by a first time Director, this film punches far above its weight. If you love Noir, you'll love this, filled as it is with shady guys. femme fatales and sharp, pacy dialogue.