Martha Marcy May Marlene/YMMV

• Award Snub: No Oscar nomination for Olsen, especially when it was highly predicted?
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Unstable family member suddenly returns after a long disappearance. Said family member is welcomed home and starts exhibiting behaviors that are not social norms. Martha's sister, Lucy, and her husband/Martha's brother-in-law, Ted, spend a lot of time bickering and debating over what to do *with* her rather than ask her more pointed questions.
  • The scene that illustrates this is Martha's panic attack at a party hosted by Lucy and Ted. She recognizes a bartender as one of the cult members. They calm her down but there is no follow-up to the effect of: "What happened? What did you see?"
  • Also of note: Martha never asks Lucy if Lucy went looking for her. There were hints of a strained relationship between the sisters before Martha disappeared. When Martha comes back, Lucy makes a lot of "parenting"/"motherly" speeches to Martha about her unusual behavior. There isn't an indication that they are even sisters until it's given away two-thirds into the film. It could be because of an implied wide age discrepancy between the two (plus or minus 5-10 years, perhaps?).
  • Interestingly, while the movie does generate sympathy for Marcy, it also makes Ted seem reasonable in his view of her as a leech. There seems to be an implication that the only reason why Patrick was able to get so many people to give up possessions and live with him in the middle of nowhere was because most of them knew that if the whole thing went South, their families would bail them out (one of the members even notes that whenever the cult is in need of money, she can ask her father for help, who's happy to give her money so long as she doesn't spend it on drugs). So basically, "hippies are social parasites."
• Nightmare Fuel: This sums up the entire film. It is one of the few non-silent films that does not use or need extensive dialogue to explain what is going on.