“Well she, she’s just a picture/Just a picture/That’s all.” That refrain is from “Marcy’s Song,” a tune by cult-favorite ’60s folk singer Jackson Frank, and in Martha Marcy May Marlene, it’s sung by Patrick (John Hawkes) to a group of young men and women who live on an upstate New York commune. It’s a sweet, wistful tune, but its effect here is chilling: Hawkes is singing to Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), who is known to the group as Marcy May — Patrick renames everyone who comes to live at the house — and the implication that she’s just an empty image, and no longer an actual person, is exactly the kind of brainwashing Patrick employs here. This is a cult, and Patrick is its quietly confident, creepily charismatic leader.

That scene occurs well into the film, part of an ongoing series of flashbacks that writer-director Sean Durkin employs to illuminate Martha’s fractured state of mind. The film opens with Martha quietly running away from the compound. After a passive-aggressive attempt from one of the other cult members to talk her into coming back fails, she calls her estranged older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who picks up the shell-shocked Martha and brings her back to the Connecticut vacation lake house she shares with her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). Assmilation into life outside the cult is difficult, as Martha has difficulty seperating herself from Patrick’s teachings. She’s gripped by paranoia that they’ll track her down and retrieve her at any moment, and is struggling, amid this confusion, to regain the psychological identity that was cruelly stripped from her.

Durkin intertwines these two stories in a structure that slowly escalates the perceived danger of the cult until the viewer is gripped by just as much paranoia as Martha at the possibility that they might surface. In the early flashbacks, Patrick’s group seems mostly repressive and psychologically manipulative. When he meets Martha for the first time, the moment he hears her name he immediately says to her, “You look like a Marcy May.” It’s the first of the tactics he uses to separate people from their identities and establish a hierarchy with him at the top. The residents have no possessions of their own, share clothing, and share sleeping space. At dinner, the men eat first as the women watch before taking their turn.

As these memories progress, the sexual abuse and violent anti-social tendencies of the cult begin to emerge. Durkin essentially manages the same trick as Patrick here, by luring us into this world slowly, as Martha was, and gradually introducing its more extreme aspects. The additive effect is the slow, nearly imperceptible tightening grip of a vice as we witness the indoctrination and slowly begin to not just understand, but to empathize with the erratic behavior that is making it very difficult for her to live with her sister and brother-in-law.

Fear is the most amazing emotion, Patrick instructs in one scene, because of the heightened awareness it creates; by encouraging his followers to tap into their fear constructively, he also opens the door for the same fear to make it nearly impossible for them to leave once they realize what he and his followers are capable of. It’s a brilliantly manipulative tactic, and Hawkes’ ability to sell Patrick as intellectually and emotionally capable of this manipulation looks effortless. Much as he did in Winter’s Bone last year, he plays a character here who is both magnetic and terrifying. But the danger Patrick presents is cloaked and insidious, as opposed to the coiled-rattler intimidation he brought to Teardrop in the earlier movie. One simultaneously wishes for more of him here because he’s so good, but also less of him because his character is so repellant.

Olsen is remarkable in the title role. Well, all three of the title roles, technically, since Martha, Marcy May, and Marlene are all names, with specific roles and expectations, that she goes by at different times in the film. Martha is profoundly damaged, but also almost completely uncommunicative, particularly around the frustrated Lucy and Ted. Durkin, aided by the dreamlike atmosphere created by Jody Lee Lipes’ cinematography, never offers firm ground to stand on, ensuring anyone watching will be as off balance and as lost as Martha. Olsen is completely convincing as a young woman quietly enduring a chaotic emotional crisis, bottling up the sources of her pain out of fear until they begin to spill over. Patrick has tried to remake her into an image on a wall with no agency of her own, but she’s fighting to get down; the problem is, it’s unclear where the biggest dangers lie.

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Martha Marcy May Marlene
Written and directed by Sean Durkin
Starring Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes, Sarah Paulson, Hugh Dancy
Running time: 120 minutes
Rated R for disturbing violent and sexual content, nudity and language.
Opens today at E Street and Bethesda Row.