→ August 24, 2019
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/24/19.

I’ve got notes stored up for an ESPN+ piece but it probably won’t run until Monday. My daughter returns to school this week too, which will mean the return of Klawchat on Thursday.

My massive article on all the games I saw at Gen Con 2019, including my ten favorites, went up at Paste this week.

My free email newsletter will also return this week once I’ve written a few more things around the interwebs.

I’m selling off a number of my superfluous board games again this year, so if you’re interested, check out my inventory page on Boardgamegeek. Thanks to Sean Lopolito of Lops Brewing in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who just bought eight games from me last week. I’ll be donating the $150 proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware.

And now, the links…

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→ June 15, 2019
→ By

Stick to baseball, 6/16/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at which teams just drafted their new #1 or #2 prospects in last week’s draft.

On July 8th, the day after the MLB Futures Game, I’ll be speaking at the Hudson Library in Hudson, Ohio, about Smart Baseball and signing books.

My free email newsletter is back, at least in the sense that I’ve sent it out twice in the last two weeks, so maybe sign up for that too.

And now, the links…

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→ March 6, 2019
→ By

Leaving Neverland.

Leaving Neverland, the new, four-hour documentary airing exclusively on HBO, is a difficult watch. Two men who say that Michael Jackson sexually molested them repeatedly over a period of many years repeat those claims on camera in unsparing detail, which in and of itself would be a painful and infuriating scene to see and hear, but that’s only a small part of what makes this film both powerful and very uncomfortable. It’s far more than a new indictment of Jackson, whose status as a serial sexual abuser is beyond doubt (and beyond remedy) at this point, but serves more as a portrait of the spiraling, exponential damage wrought on their victims and their families years after the abuse has stopped.

Wade Robson and James Safechuck both say in Leaving Neverland that Jackson began abusing them when they were very young – Robson from age 7, Safechuck around the same age – and that it continued for many years, accompanied by all of the behavior we now associate with serial abusers: grooming, co-opting, and above all threatening. Robson says many times that Jackson convinced him that they would both go to jail if they were caught. Both Robson’s and Safechuck’s mothers appear in the documentary as well, as both were there when Jackson met the boys and fell under the singer’s spell, becoming unwitting accomplices to the abuse, agreeing to let their sons spend many nights sleeping at Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and accepting their sons’ answers at the time that no abuse was taking place.

While the documentary tells the history of the abuse and the public accusations of Jackson while the singer was still alive, including the 1993 accusation by Jordy Chandler, settled out of court for $23 million, and the 2003-04 accusations by Gavin Arvizo, which led to a criminal trial and an acquittal on all charges, it’s far more about the victims here than the pedophile at its center. (That said, there are some shocking moments from historical footage, including one of Jackson’s lawyers standing before the media in 2003, threatening to ruin the lives of anyone who might come forward to accuse Jackson of further crimes.) Robson was born in Brisbane, and won a dance contest that allowed him to meet Jackson, who thoroughly bamboozled Robson’s mother to the point that she left Australia and her husband, taking Wade and his sister Chantal to California in the belief that Jackson would help develop her son’s career as a dancer. Safechuck, who was the boy in the dressing room in that famous Pepsi commercial with Jackson (if you’re old enough, you almost certainly remember it), is an only child, but Jackson’s ‘interest’ in him led his mother to similarly turn their lives upside down to try to further James’ career, driving a wedge between her and his father that persists today. (His father doesn’t appear in the film.)

There’s too much commentary out there already about the mothers’ culpability in allowing the abuse to begin and continue, as well as a comment from one of the jurors in the 2003 trial that Gavin’s parents were idiots for letting the boy sleep with Jackson, but Leaving Neverland documents how well-meaning, loving parents can be hoodwinked by a sociopathic, determined pedophile who has the means to assuage any doubts or, unfortunately, buy them away. He showered the families with gifts, flew them places first-class, gave the boys unforgettable experiences on stage, while also presenting himself to the families as a lonely, misunderstood adult whose childhood was stolen from him by the pressures of global stardom. The way that the victims and their families describe the early stages of Jackson’s grooming of the boys, you can see how someone in the moment might have felt sorry for the singer, whose childhood was obviously difficult and who said he was beaten by his father, but it also becomes clear that Jackson used his past as a wedge he could drive between his victims and their parents – and that he did so with the help of enabling assistants who probably should have long ago been called to account for their actions.

Part one of the documentary delivers a lot of prologue, explaining how the two boys met Jackson and ended up victims, but part two is where the point of the story lies, as we hear, in their own words and those of family members, about the permanent damage wreaked upon them all by Jackson’s abuse. Both men speak of mental health issues, never saying PTSD but clearly suffering from it, and are still coping with their effects, while their relationships with family members are all fractured, some likely beyond any repair. Both mothers are themselves wracked with guilt that will never fade, because the damage cannot be undone, to their sons and to their families, and to other victims who might have been spared had anyone picked up on the signs of abuse and put a stop to Jackson’s ‘sleepovers’ sooner.

Both men describe the molestation in specific terms, which is a potential trigger for some viewers and worth bearing in mind before you watch Leaving Neverland. I was not personally triggered by that, but the part of the documentary – and the online response – I’ve found profoundly unsettling is the support for the abusive pedophile at the heart of the story. We see scenes of supporters outside the courthouse with signs proclaiming Jackson’s innocence (really, how could you know?), including some dingbat releasing white doves when the not guilty charges come through. We see videos of people attacking Robson online from when he went public with his abuse story, contradicting testimony he’d given in the 2003 trial that Jackson had never molested him. And if you’ve been on Twitter at all the last few nights and clicked on the #LeavingNeverland hashtag or searched for names involved in the documentary, you’ve seen all manner of support for the singer, saying he was innocent and attacking the victims and their families. You have to be deeply deluded to think that all four of the accusers we know about have lied about everything, even though these two men tell stories that are highly specific and show a pattern of behavior, to still think Jackson is the real victim here.

Director Dan Reed largely stays out of the way of the story here – aside from some drone shots of LA that don’t add much except some running time – but there is also a clear subtext to Leaving Neverland about the allure of celebrity, and how Jackson used it to seduce the families of both boys, and then to seduce the boys themselves. Both mothers, interviewed very extensively on camera, speak of Jackson’s interest in their sons’ careers and in their families as immensely flattering, and the combination of power and money led them to choose to upend their personal lives and helped blind them to what, in hindsight, should have been blindingly obvious.

Robson’s sister and Safechuck both say that they’re not asking people to forget Jackson’s artistry, but to remember the whole person – that this incredibly talented human was also a pedophile and sexual predator. I don’t see how we can continue to separate the art from the artist in this case, not now that I’ve seen the movie. You can’t simply “cancel” a musician of his importance and influence; we can stop playing Jackson’s music, and certainly Capital One should stop playing its commercial with “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” now, but Jackson has directly and indirectly influenced multiple generations of pop musicians since “I Want You Back” was their first hit in 1969. There is no erasure here, only a time for an overdue reckoning with his legacy as a talented person who did unspeakable things and ruined many lives. Leaving Neverland won’t convince people who don’t want to hear it, but it is a devastating portrait of grooming, sexual abuse, and the cascading ramifications that come years after it ends.

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→ May 8, 2018
→ By

You Were Never Really Here.

I’m a known sucker for just about anything noir or even noir-ish – I mean, my most anticipated movie of 2018 is The Happytime Murders, which might be best categorized as “Muppet film noir” – so Lynne Ramsey’s latest movie, You Were Never Really Here, is more or less right in my subjective wheelhouse. It is dark as hell, unrelenting, and viscerally satisfying even as the grotesque imagery disturbs you. With yet another star turn from Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, it gives the hero/antihero dichotomy a third look, with a detective who suffers from PTSD due to repeated traumas and channels some of that energy into finding missing girls – and into brutally beating his adversaries with a hammer.

Based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here gives us Joe (Phoenix), a private detective who seems obsessed with secrecy to a paranoid extent, and who we see from the very start engages in self-destructive behavior like nearly asphyxiating himself in dry-cleaner plastic bags. He returns from a successful rescue in Cincinnati to see his boss, McCleary (John Doman of The Wire), and eventually receives a new assignment to rescue the missing daughter of a widowed state senator. Beginning with an address that the senator received via an anonymous text, Joe stakes out the building, which he suspects is a brothel with underaged girls inside, but the rescue attempt opens him up to a broader conspiracy – perhaps justifying his earlier paranoia – and a spreading web of violence that puts everyone close to Joe in the killers’ sights.

The mystery around the missing girl, Nina (played by Ekaterina Samsonov, who is 15 but looks much younger for this role), is secondary to the story of Joe, which we get via brief, often disjointed flashbacks as they might appear in Joe’s own mind as he re-experiences traumatic memories from childhood, where his father was abusive to him and to Joe’s mother; and from his time serving in the Army in the Middle East. The depiction of trauma is hard to watch, but ultimately realistic in how the brain revisits the trauma and the actions a victim might take as coping mechanisms that don’t do anything to solve the long-term problem. Rather than use the traumatic history as a plot device – here’s why Joe is the way he is – the film shows the ongoing damage he’s suffering from it. To the very end, there is no indication that Joe, who wants to assure Nina that thinks will be okay, is anything close to okay himself.

Phoenix is tremendous in this role, delivering a more nuanced performance than he did with his Oscar-nominated impersonation of Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, giving Joe the right level of simmering rage that gives little warning before it boils over. He won Best Actor at Cannes last year, just about a year ago this week, for the film, which also won the Best Screenplay award there for Ramsey. (It lost the Palme d’Or to The Square, which is a poor choice and seems a very Cannes thing to have happen.) Samsonov is a revelation in a small but critical role, one that becomes much more important and, I would imagine, difficult for a child actor, as the story progresses and Nina becomes more than just a prop for the plot.

The film is dark in the literal sense as well, with grimy shots of alleys and stairwells, disorienting top-down shots of Joe in action, and even some violence (almost all of which is left off-camera) shown as if on security-camera footage. The hammer is Joe’s weapon of choice, for reasons that become apparent in the film as well, but Ramsey films the various assaults from behind Joe or from such a distance that you don’t actually see the hits. There’s blood in the film, but it’s all shown after the fact, and in those cases it’s not Joe’s doing; the one time we see Joe interacting with one of his own victims, the result is morbidly comic and almost sentimental, one of the only times we get a glimpse of Joe’s deeply empathetic streak when he’s not beating someone’s brains in.

The lack of air is a recurring motif in this film, a possible metaphor for the feelings of panic and the sense of being ‘trapped’ that often haunt PTSD sufferers until they get real help (not just, say, cognitive behavioral therapy, which doesn’t work for PTSD). There’s no sign here that Joe has ever sought treatment, so he’s caught in a cycle of reliving his traumas, even dissociating for moments, to the point where I expected it to eventually cost him in a physical conflict. (I won’t spoil whether that happens.) But we keep returning to situations where he can’t breathe, or finds someone in such a situation, which certainly mirrors the experience of having a full-blown panic attack.

This isn’t a movie for everyone or even for most people; it’s grim, there’s enough results-of-violence on screen to merit the R rating, and while we see none of the abuse of underaged girls, it’s present enough in the story that it would likely deter many viewers. I think it’s superb, however, reminiscent of the bleak noir novels of Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, pop. 1280) or Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. While not quite as hopeless as those books can be, You Were Never Really Here captures that same sense of existential darkness, and like Thompson’s books in particular, it succeeds in getting us inside the head of the protagonist and using the crime as a vehicle to explore his character in a way few films in the detective/noir genre have done.

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→ April 15, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 4/15/18.

Two new posts for Insiders this week, both on draft prospects I went to see: one on Ryan Weathers, Ryan Rolison, and Ethan Hankins; another on Kentucky’s Sean Hjelle and Tristan Pompey. All five are likely first rounders, although Hankins, coming back from a shoulder issue, could end up going to Vanderbilt if teams aren’t willing to pony up.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the dice-drafting game Sagrada, which is easy to learn but has very high replay value. Players choose dice from a common set, rolled each round, to fill out their personal boards resembling stained-glass windows. I’ve also been playing a ‘pre-alpha’ release of the Terraforming Mars app on Steam, and it looks fantastic.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! Buy a zillion copies for all your Linkedin contacts. You should also sign up for my free not-quite-weekly email newsletter, which has more personal essays and links to everything I’ve written.

And now, the links…

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→ December 15, 2017
→ By

The Body Keeps the Score.

I’ve been open about my own mental health issues, such as this piece I wrote on being anxious throughout my childhood, but am fortunate in one respect in that my childhood was also relatively free of trauma. I grew up in a loving family, didn’t lose any close family members until I was a teenager – both of my grandmothers lived to their 100th birthdays – and never had to deal with the effects of divorce or abuse, to pick just two possible traumas that affect kids. Events I might recall as “traumatic” pale in comparison to what others grew up with.

I’ve only come to learn about trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in the last handful of years, due to several close friends who suffer from it and how its effects can often include problems I’ve dealt with, including anxiety, panic, depression. Somewhere along the way I heard about Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal 2015 book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I have since learned is an incredibly influential and important book in the world of mental health professionals. Dr. van der Kolk has spent decades working with trauma victims and was one of the leading proponents of the hypothesis, later supported by fMRI and similar evidence, that trauma actually alters the brain in a physical sense rather than just a mental one, and that even minor events can still have traumatic effects on our brains, especially when they happen while we’re young.

Dr. van der Kolk spends the first part of The Body Keeps the Score discussing his own history in working with trauma victims and the difficulty he and other colleagues had in even gaining acceptance for the idea of the aftermath of trauma as a distinct medical disorder. PTSD was only recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a formal diagnosis in 1980, when it was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders‘s third edition (DSM-III), thanks to a surge in sufferers among soldiers who returned from fighting in Vietnam. Awareness of the condition dates back to ancient Greece, and is well-documented in medical and popular literature from the 1800s forward under terms like “shell shock” (whence our word “shell-shocked” derives), but people with PTSD prior to 1980 were treated as if they had a panoply of other, seemingly unrelated mental health disorders, which led to problems like overmedication and a lack of any progress back towards a normal life.

From there, the author discusses new evidence from the world of neuroscience to support his and others’ hypotheses that the brain of a trauma victim works differently than the brain of someone without PTSD. Different parts of the brain are activated in similar situations, although among trauma victims there can be varying responses, from panic to dissociation to shutdown. He also discusses the various ways we develop PTSD, often in excruciating details of childhood abuse or wartime atrocities, tying these underlying conditions to changes in methylation of genes that can even be passed on to offspring, a process known as “epigenetics,” that also explains how the brains of trauma victims end up operating on a different BIOS than those of others.

The prose here can feel a bit academic, perhaps the result of van der Kolk’s background but also that he’s a native Dutch speaker and writing in his second language. In part five, which constitutes nearly half of the book, the writing livens up as he delves into various methods of attacking trauma and retraining the brain not to panic, dissociate, or just peace out when the person is presented with a trigger. Some suggestions are obvious or well-known, like using yoga or EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but does help trauma victims), while others are novel and surprising, including participation in theater or similar role-playing activities, or using a computer program to try to ‘reprogram’ the brain not just in its fear response but all of the time. He includes EEG graphs that show patterns of attention in the brains of study participants where the trauma victims’ brain waves are less tightly connected and even diverge in the milliseconds after the subject was presented with information for the brain to process. Neurofeedback, which allows the user to regulate his/her own brain function with the help of software that displays EEG results, has shown promise for trauma victims and people with other mental health disorders to reestablish control over their brains’ betrayals. Dr. van der Kolk also goes into heart-rate variability training, self-leadership of the different parts of our personality (not quite dissociative identity disorder, but leaning that way), and the pros and cons of cognitive behavioral therapy or medication for PTSD sufferers.

If you or someone close to you is a trauma victim of any sort, even if it seems like a ‘minor’ trauma, The Body Keeps a Score will be an illuminating read that could help alter the course of your/your intimate’s treatment. Even just the final section, where he points out why things like CBT aren’t effective (discussing the trauma over and over doesn’t actually change the way the brain responds to it or other triggers) and gives numerous suggestions for other remedies, would be useful. If you can get through some of the more technical language earlier in the book, though, the entire read is worthwhile, especially as van der Kolk explains his own journey of understanding through decades of working with veterans, children, and other trauma victims to get to this comprehensive theory of how best to treat these people – often people who were considered untreatable by previous generations of psychiatrists.

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→ December 31, 2016
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/31/16.

No Insider pieces and no Klawchat this week, between the lack of MLB activity, a little holiday-related travel, and me just generally taking it easy this week. I did review the boardgame City of Spies: Estoril 1942 for Paste, and have reviews coming up for Doom, Kodama, and Inis.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

  • Texas is making rapid progress in becoming the nation’s worst backwater, from anti-gay laws to wiping out abortion clinics to reducing environmental protections to a statewide cut in special education resources, as detailed in this Houston Chronicle investigative report on how tens of thousands of disabled children in Texas aren’t getting the education help they deserve.
  • This New York Times profile on an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD who was convicted of a home invasion highlights how little we do for soldiers returning from active combat duty, and how costly the war in Iraq has been in human lives.
  • I thought the Telegraph had the best piece on George Michael’s career, life, and death at age 53, possibly the result of a heroin addiction. If you haven’t heard his 1990 album, Listen Without Prejudice, Volume 1, it stands up incredibly well today for its mixture of styles that, at the time, was seen as a disappointment by fans who wanted him to remain a bubblegum pop star. And the same publication also wrote how horrible Gene Kelly was to a 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds during the filming of Singing in the Rain, and how Fred Astaire came to the rescue.
  • Security expert Bruce Schneier, who coined the term “security theater” to refer to all the things we do to appear to make our lives safer, points out that TSA Pre-Check also won’t work, as it just provides a second way for a would-be terrorist to beat the system and get on a plane. He links to a former TSA administrator’s post explaining Pre-Check’s vulnerabilities, but the two disagree on the solution – Schneier wants less pre-flight screening for everyone, rather than for a select few, saying that terrorists are going to pick ‘clean’ operatives no matter what we do.
  • This longread on Olympian Debbie Thomas’ descent into mental illness and poverty is from March, but I just found it this week and it’s one of the best and most awful stories I’ve read in the last few months. Thomas won a bronze medal in Calgary in 1988, became a doctor, but has lost everything in the last few years as a result of bipolar disorder.
  • Donald Trump took credit for Sprint’s decision, made in April, to add 5000 jobs in the U.S., and here’s a partial list of media outlets who repeated his lie in headlines without pointing out its untruth. Yes, there’s more to an article than a headline, but I know from experience many people will read the headline and then move along … but will still send me an angry email about a headline I didn’t write. (Editors write headlines, not writers.)
  • A New York Times investigation found rampant bribery among Homeland Security officials charged with protecting our borders. I doubt there’s a simple solution to this: no private or public entity will pay agents more than defeating the security is worth to those trying to do so.
  • The same Russian hacker group that has been accused of trying to influence our election placed malware on a computer at the main electric utility in Vermont, raising concerns about an attack on our infrastructure.
  • Meanwhile, the Russian government has also been supporting far-right movements across Europe in an attempt to destabilize EU states, finding success in Hungary, Estonia, and Bulgaria, along with the rise of the neo-Nazi National Front Party in France.
  • “More than a third of the almost 200 people who have met with President-elect Donald Trump since his election last month, including those interviewing for administration jobs, gave large amounts of money to support his campaign and other Republicans this election cycle.” So begins this Politico story on the rising kleptocracy in Washington, where money buys you direct access like we haven’t seen in decades (under either party).
  • Another neo-Nazi group is planning an armed march in Whitefish, Montana, where its founder’s mother lives. There’s more background, and information on the community’s response, in this audio piece from NPR, which describes businesses putting menorahs in windows to show support and solidarity this week.
  • Jane Coaston of MTV.com looks at the roots and insolubility of the Syrian civil war.
  • New York issued the first (known) birth certificate for an intersex person – that is, one that states the person’s sex as “intersex,” referring to someone born with physical and genetic characteristics of both sexes, often including sexual organs. This is law catching up to science, but I ask you, North Carolina and Texas and Mississippi and every bigot out there trying to make life miserable for people unlike you: What bathroom would you like her to use?
  • In 2018 and 2020, remember how the Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing to even hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, nominated to fill that vacancy by President Obama.
  • The political crisis in Burundi, sparked by the questionable re-election of Pierre Nkurunziza to a third term as President, was not helped when he hinted he might run again in 2020. The Burundian constitution limits the president to a single re-election, and his decision to run roughshod over that clause led to 500 deaths and over 300,000 refugees leaving the country.
  • An open letter from 23 activists, many of them Nobel laureates, calls for the UN Security Council to stop ethnic cleansing in Burma against the Rohingya minority – and criticizes Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi for her inaction on this issue.
  • That Gambian election a few weeks ago that appeared to end the tyrannic rule of President Yahya Jammeh? Yeah, well, so much for that, as Jammeh is trying to annul the results and declare himself the winner. Senegal, which surrounds Gambia on all but the latter’s tiny coastal border, has said a military intervention is only a “last resort.”
  • Fortune looks at the recent spate of frauds among tech startups, asking whether this is a growing trend giving the amount of VC money flying around.
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→ December 2, 2011
→ By

Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a tense story of a woman who, after fleeing a cult-like commune, shows increasing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder as she attempts to reestablish her normal life and a relationship with her selfish sister and difficult brother-in-law. Based on the true story of a friend of writer/director Sean Durkin, the film is driven by two very strong performances and the use of both silence and background noise to allow the audience to feel the tension grow with the main character’s own mental troubles.

The film begins when Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley) flees the commune where she has lived for two years and calls her sister to ask for help; the call is awkward and Martha nearly gives up, showing how far she had fallen into the clutches of the commune’s charismatic, depraved leader Patrick (John Hawkes). From there, we see parallel narratives, one tracking Martha’s first few days of freedom with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law ted (Hugh Dancy) who want to help her as long as it’s no real inconvenience to them, the other following her two years in the cult from her first day to the incident that triggered her decision to escape. Both narratives follow similar curves with an initial ascent followed by a long, gradual decline, a dichotomy where each storyline intensifies the other.

The commune’s true nature only becomes apparent through gradual glimpses through Martha’s memory – and it’s possible that Martha isn’t a reliable narrator, given what happens to her in the other narrative – that reveal the commune to us more or less as it was revealed to her. She’s taken in as a bit of a lost soul, charmed by Patrick, eventually drugged and raped by him (which is explained to her as a “special” event that begins the “cleansing”) as part of her initiation. Patrick exercises control over the commune’s members through very subtle psychological manipulation, although that turns darker as the story develops. Martha – whom Patrick has rechristened “Marcy May,” as he renames all of the members – drifts into the lifestyle of the commune, never questioning any of its practices because she’s pleased, or at least satisfied, to have something resembling a family.

That need for family is explained in part by Martha’s time with her sister and brother-in-law, both flawed themselves and particularly ill-equipped to deal with a woman who has just fled a cult but claims she simply left a boyfriend. Her problems in this timeline start out as mere distance, moodiness, and ignorance of some social customs, but degenerate into delusions and paranoia, and Lucy and Ted show very little compassion or even the ability to generate it – we go through more than 80% of the movie before Lucy finally confronts Martha directly with the question of what happened to her during her two years out of contact. Their parents gone, Lucy is Martha’s only family, but there’s little warmth between them and more obligation than outright love, which stands in the way of Martha’s recovery almost as much as her own unwillingness to discuss what happened does.

Olsen is superb in the film, her first screen role, particularly in the second half of the film when she’s required to show a broader range of emotions; in the first half, she’s emotionally vacant in both narratives, but gets to stretch out into two different faces of the same character as the narrative unfolds. But Hawkes dominates his half of the story by almost trying not to dominate it: There’s no showiness, no bravura, just small gestures, eye contact, a faint change in the tone of his voice to convey the power he has over his charges. Olsen’s growing fear is the primary driver of the tension in the commune storyline, but Hawkes’ magnetism manages to elevate it even when all we have is the threat of his entrance. He’s a monster despite never acting like one; she’s the victim but never acts victim-like, only showing it through a slow crescendo of confusion and fear.

Both leads will at least be in the running for Best Actor/Actress nominations, although those categories are incredibly competitive, and if nothing else I think Martha Marcy May Marlene – the reason for the fourth name is too good to spoil – will end up with a Best Original Screenplay nod. If you can find it and like a tense, psychological drama with the tension of a British thriller, it’s well worth seeing.

I’d like to discuss the meaning of the end of the film, but for those of you who haven’t seen it, you may want to skip ahead. This paragraph has no value other than providing a warning and a buffer.

–

And this is another buffer, in case you didn’t listen the first time. Spoilers ahead.

There are three ways to interpret the end of the film, two literal, one other metaphorical. Perhaps the man is from the cult and has come to capture, harm, or kill Martha, which is certainly what she’s fearing. Perhaps the man’s appearance is just a coincidence; he could even be a random stalker, but not from the cult. But I favor a third interpretation – that the man’s status is irrelevant; the point of the scene is that Martha isn’t free of the effects of her two years in the cult, and might never be free. She will assume any incident like this is about the cult, or she’ll even experience more delusions like the two she had at the house and will see someone from the cult where there’s no one. The idea that her ordeal isn’t over is paramount, which is why it’s unnecessary to show the viewer the outcome of the incident in the street.

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