The word ‘cult’ isn’t actually uttered in writer/director Sean Durkin’s unsettling drama, and yet a cult is precisely what Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley) escapes in this one’s tense opening scenes. Martha then decides that her only choice is to contact Lucy (Sarah Paulson), the understanding sister she hasn’t seen in two years, and then stay at the lakeside cottage Lucy shares with her uppity English husband Ted (Hugh Dancy), who thinks it’s a bit bloody rich that Martha’s exploiting her sibling after such a long silence. However, privileged, non-chronological glimpses into Martha’s mind demonstrate just how damaged she truly is: we watch as she’s welcomed into the farm-residing group, where women do all the work, Watts (Brady Corbet) watches and, sometimes, leader Patrick (John Hawkes) emerges to reassert psychological control; we’re with Martha as she’s raped while, somehow, convinced that what she’s enduring she wants (and then later inducts another girl into the inner circle); and we’re not surprised as the group becomes more dangerous and hating of the outside world.

And yet Lucy and Ted don’t know this about Martha (how could she possibly say, “Oh yeah, by the way, guys, I was brainwashed in a cult”, when she doesn’t realise that’s precisely what has happened?), and this is at the very heart of director Durkin’s drama, providing its drive, its occasional frustrations and, of course, a sense of creeping unease.

Mad Dog Bradley

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