I recently rewatched MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (streaming on STAR at DisneyPlus) and got even more out of it the second time. This hidden gem tells the story of a young woman struggling to cope with life after leaving a cult.

Twenty-two-year-old Martha flees a farmhouse in which a group of people are living. She calls the only family she has left, which is her sister, who picks her up and takes her to her vacation home next to a lake, where she’s staying with her husband. Martha acts bizarrely, alternately terrified and defiantly clinging to the ideals of the group she lived with. Martha has a long, hard road ahead of her to stay away from the group and grasp a new life.

The film may strike some as a bit surprising in its take. Many of us associate cults with Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple or Heavens Gate, wild-eyed and smiling fanatics forcibly brainwashing others with bizarre, grisly rituals. In most cults, and there are an estimated thousands of them in the USA, most are only a few members at most, and they don’t seem that weird at first glance. They all have certain things in common, though: a lofty unifying ideal, recruitment, love bombing new initiates, psychological manipulation and dependency, and a charismatic figure who requires obedience.

At first, Martha’s group appears to be a bunch of idealistic young people who want simple, communal living without technology. If you asked Martha when she joined, I doubt she’d say she knew she was joining a cult. The more we learn through her flashbacks, the more we discover her group is in fact a cult, a cult being defined as a group that controls and harms its members and harms its community. And when she leaves, it’s not because she recognizes the whole thing as insane or evil. It’s not strategic. Most decisions by cult members to leave is far more tactical, dealing with methods or how they’re treated by others. When they do leave, they often become depressed, purposeless, unable to think for themselves. We see all this very subtly in Martha’s story, which is roughly based on cult survivors’ accounts.

On a side note, John Hawkes nails the role of the cult leader who dominates every aspect of the lives of the group, and Elizabeth Olsen chews the scenery in her debut role as Martha.

Overall, MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE is a powerful film about how people get into cults, what it’s like to be in one, and that when you leave the cult, it may never leave you.

Amazon original THE VAST OF NIGHT (2019, streaming on Prime) is a fun and intelligent low-budget sci-fi story that is strong on storytelling, but its strength is weakened by way too heavy direction.

It’s the 1950s, we see a small town in New Mexico, and a big basketball game is about to start in the school gym. Everett, a fast-talking, confident college kid who works the local radio station, bumps into Fay, a high schooler who works nights at the town’s phone switchboard. They accidentally discover a strange sound frequency in the air, which leads them to unlock an old town mystery.

The trailer is fantastic, though the movie doesn’t quite deliver what’s promised, which is a fun, STRANGER THINGS-type story about plucky kids in over their heads but fighting through it. It’s close, though, and I liked the script, which is heavy on dialogue but goes to great lengths to produce a sense of realism and deep storytelling that provokes the imagination. Unfortunately, Everett and Fay aren’t as likeable as the trailer suggests–Fay is erratic and a nag, while Everett is cold and a jerk–which is fine, but their characterizations aren’t put to effective work. But I didn’t mind. While I wasn’t emotionally invested enough to root for them, they’re likeable enough, and the story works.

Where VAST OF NIGHT failed for me was in the heavyhanded direction. The creators should have trusted the script to produce immersion, but instead they set up a frame–this is all a 1950s PARADOX THEATER episode–that frequently intrudes along with the screen cutting to black, impressive but unnecessary long tracking shots, and sudden, rapid cuts when somebody is doing something. The film constantly calls attention to itself, taking me out of the story to a level where when some chilling revelation comes, I simply didn’t care, since I’d been reminded so many times it’s just a movie. VAST OF NIGHT has gotten a fair reaction from viewers but a very strong reaction from critics, with many of the reviews citing its technical prowess; that’s a problem.

So overall, I found VAST OF NIGHT an enjoyable, interesting watch with some strong storytelling, though I was more impressed with its possibilities than what it achieved.

(On a final note, if you have a character who’s a chain smoker, get an actor who smokes and let them smoke, or cut the smoking altogether. It’s weird seeing people take two mouth puffs and then put the cigarette out only to light another.)