Just when they thought they were out ...
We know your watching time is limited. And the amount of things available to watch … is not. Looking for a movie? Nearly any movie ever made? It's probably streaming somewhere. That's a lot of movies. |
Below, we're suggesting two of them, the latest of our weekly double-feature recommendations. We think the movies will pair well — with each other and with you. |
Your weekly double feature: Cult cinema |
 | | Elizabeth Olsen and Sarah Paulson in a scene from "Martha Marcy May Marlene."Jody Lee Lipes/Fox Searchlight Pictures |
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'The Master' and 'Martha Marcy May Marlene' |
When the director John Huston made the hourlong film "Let There Be Light," in 1946, the term post-traumatic stress disorder didn't exist. But the U.S. Army, which commissioned the project, intended to show the efficacy of psychiatric treatment on World War II veterans with "shell shock." Huston understood himself as a documentarian, though, not a propagandist, and the film proved so disturbing in its revelations that it was suppressed for decades. |
Inspired in part by Huston's documentary, Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" (2012), now streaming on Netflix, references the postwar origins of Scientology, which flourished in the vacuum created by trauma and spiritual need. Opening at the end of the war, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix as a sailor whose erratic behavior leaves him adrift before he stumbles into a charismatic charlatan with all the answers. This L. Ron Hubbard type, played as a man with his own insatiable needs by Philip Seymour Hoffman, takes Phoenix's wounded soul under his wing and sets about promoting "The Cause," a set of dubious philosophies that outsiders understand as a cult. Within their combustible codependency, Anderson finds a mutual, heartbreaking emptiness. |
Released the year before "The Master," Sean Durkin's "Martha Marcy May Marlene" (2011) is like its mirror image: The way a young woman feels fleeing a cult looks awfully similar to how Phoenix's character feels entering one. Long before her popular turn as the Scarlet Witch in "WandaVision" and the Avengers movies, Elizabeth Olsen gave a breakthrough performance as that ex-cult member, who tries to settle in with her sister (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law (Hugh Dancy) after two years at an abusive commune. But escaping her memories isn't easy, and she doesn't have the emotional tools to cope on her own. She can leave the cult, but in this terrifying psychodrama, the cult doesn't leave her. SCOTT TOBIAS |
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