Durkin’s first feature, as a follow-up to the short “Mary Last Seen”, reiterates his primary interest (shared by his colleague and friend Antonio Campos): America and its history, its mythology, its subconscious, its psyche. From the story of Martha, a fragile girl emotionally deprived of family affection, who thinks she might find her true self within a sect (still today, there are countless sects in America), Durkin questions the values, ideas and psychoses of such a complex and fascinating society as the American one, starting with the family, moving onto materialism and consumerism, the American dream, violence and ending in the ultimate idea of escape, of flight – it’s ironic that Martha ends up fleeing… the sect – from a “sick” society through alternative ways of life (free love, communitarianism, self-management, etc.). In the last case in particular, Charles Manson, one of the big badly resolved “issues” of the American 20th century, comes undisguised to the surface, a step in which the totalitarian, violent and, after all, hate culture that nourishes many of these sects is deconstructed by Durkin. The parallel editing, narrating the action in the present and in flashback, more than creating a visually superimposed structure (from one shot of Martha jumping in the present into a lake, we move onto a jump into another lake in the past, in a continuous flow that corresponds to her mental flow), deliberately confuses present and past, memory and fantasy, reality and paranoia. At the same time, that very “parallelism” favours and pushes to an extreme the tension between the two philosophies of life being confronted, as if everything were decided in those two opposite poles and there were no other intermediary life option for Martha, which signals a certain and real disorientation among the younger American population (now as before). (FN)