Did you people see the same film I saw?

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

First off....I am starting to not agree with critics views on a movie being good. I was pissed that I wasted my time in watching a long and drawn out movie. It had it moments where you thought Olsen's character would explain more of what happened to her own sister but nope....she is just weird and crazy. Elizabeth Olsen's part was great and on point in acting. The story line was just a bore. The ending really pissed me off. It was one of the those endings when the movie just ends. I am glad I did not go to the movies to see this.

This is a tough film to watch because it is so incredibly static, and leaves the viewer with many unanswered questions. Although Elizabeth Olsen made a great performance I wish that they used more character development for her. That was the point though...to leave her character blurry, indecipherable, and undefined like the very barcode in the film poster. I feel like there was also a parallel between Martha's carnal, unconstrained nudity and her "stripped" soul. She is reduced to nothing but a body, a shell. I thought that it was strange to see a film involving a cult that had nothing to do with religion. Even though this was an extremely slow film in which not much truly happens, it seems like so much more when you analyze things in hindsight.

The psychological thriller is an old film genre that has had many great entries; directors have experimented for many years with the possibility of using the oblique view of the movie camera to depict madness's loose grip on reality. My own personal favorite is Hitchcock's Spellbound from 1945, when Ingrid Bergman tries to convince Gregory Peck that he is not losing his mind, despite the limited info that the audience gets to render its own judgment.MMMM is a worthy update of this tradition for our century, because it plays on so many of our nightmare scenarios and then creates a real nightmare for us to "enjoy." Elizabeth Olsen is simply awesome as a troubled younger sister who makes a bad choice and ends up inside a horror show ala Charles Manson. (Unlikely, but it could happen!) The film, like Spellbound, is told from her point of view, which is very uncomfortable since she is clearly going mad. The movie goes for a dual narrative--her descent into lunacy at her sister's house parallels a series of revelations that we get about the cult as she relives her recollections. We are never sure what is reality and what is simply a nightmare; she says as much, at one point asking her sister, "Have you ever been to a point where you can't tell if something is a memory or a dream?" Her sister responds "no" but this is because she is the sane one. Some people might be uncomfortable with all of the cinematic trickery--the parallel narratives, the nightmarish portrayals of the reality of the cult, etc. I think it is terrific--in a movie of this type you should be disoriented. You not only get the story, but you get it as the lunatic actually experiences it, which makes it all the more disturbing.Additionally, this is a movie designed for some degree of realism, as opposed to the soppy entertainment and cheap thrills that come with other psychological thrillers. I think it is convincing--PTSD and psychotic cults are a reality of our world, and the acting from Olsen and Hawkes really takes us there. So much so, that I suspect that there will be negative reviews of this flick out of sheer revulsion. If you are in for this, however, MMMM is a modern masterpiece, a scary movie about some things that may well be true; we just don't know.

The movie starts with Martha escaping a cult and managing to contact her sole real family left - her sister - who comes to pick her up and takes her in her grand house at a lake. But the aftermath process after escaping the cult still needs to start - the flashbacks of the abuse she lived through as well as the bonding she experienced, which typically belong to PTSD.For some viewers there may seem to be plot holes, like Martha eating openly at a diner in the village nearby the cult. But daylight and a public place seems instinctively the safest place for her, even though when confronted in the diner by the second hand of the cult's leader Patrick she does not have the courage to speak out to the server. While the second hand approaches her, talks to her, how the cult leader misses and worries about her, he leaves, nor forces her back. This seems weird on the surface when you know this cult burglarizes homes and murders people and the cult wouldn't want to have witnesses roaming free. However, cult leaders know the extent of the emotional and psychological impact they have. Abuse causes what's called a trauma bond within the target (and it doesn't have to be physical abuse), and it's stronger than any love bond and highly addictive. They know that soon enough she'll miss them more than she fears, distrusts or even hates them. And without proper psychological guidance she won't have the tools to quit the oxytocin addiction (bonding hormone) and the obsessive thoughts about them.This is what we witness with Martha. She has nightmares and memory flashes of events when she was with the cult: her loss of her name and it being changed into Marcy, her ritual drug-rape by the cult leader and the other women telling her how to feel about it ('it's a good thing', 'smile') and so negating her the right to feel how she really feels about it (awful, raped, betrayed); cult leader Patrick seemingly putting her on a pedestal by singing a song about her ('she's a picture') and at the same time devaluing her ('and nothing more'), and then later she doing the same thing to the next new recruited girl...In a way the flashbacks during the PTSD process are necessary in order to heal from the trauma and abuse. The victim has negated their feelings (the pain, the anger, the shock) about the traumatic events when they occur, and yet one cannot start the mourning and healing process of both the separation and trauma without first actually reconnecting with her or his feelings locked away of that time. It's not so much that victims forgot the events, but they push it away and forgot how they felt about it deep down at the time.The problem for Martha is that neither her sister nor her brother in law even know that she lived with a cult. Martha never tells them. To them she stopped calling her sister two years ago, and she lived with a boyfriend for two years. Her sister's husband wants to instill his version of a responsible person in her - think of a career, behave normal, don't live off your sister and me for such a long time. Her sister tries to give her space, patience, time and company, but naturally shows her frustration when she hits the wall around Martha. She suspects Martha has been abused, but makes the common mistake to suspect the ex-boyfriend hit her, not knowing that emotional and mental abuse has as damaging impact.As the flashbacks emerge of the community life and her sister and brother-in-law behave towards her as if they expect she should be 'normal' the addictive bond rears its head up and she calls the cult, her 'new family'. For the cult this is a sign that she is ready to return to the fold.While the remote lake house of her sister seems a great retreat to heal from the trauma, it actually only strengthens her fears and for good reasons. The cult lived in a remote area nearby similar grand lake houses. They burglarized and even murdered in such homes. Now she's living in such one. Together with the PSTD, the nightmares and a triggering environment, and her mistake to call the cult from her sister's home, it's not surprising that she increasingly starts to fear for the cult to come and seek her out and violently take her 'home' again. For outsiders it seems she's paranoid, but paranoia is an unreasonable fear. Martha's fear is not unreasonable, though the movie remains ambiguous about the fact whether the cult is truly trying to apprehend her again.