With only 500 dollars in his pocket and, while working on the script for “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, Durkin filmed this short applauded at Sundance and awarded at Cannes 2010, which is in fact an introduction to his first feature, as if leaving the “clues” for what would come next. In both films, the central object of this American filmmaker’s attention is a sect that lives in a commune and the type of relationships and effects that are established among its members, another way of looking into a complex country called America. In a way, it is as if the short ended where the feature begins, as if the former left us “at the door” of the latter, literally: the film ends with the character played by Brady Corbet (who recruits new members in both films) leaving his girlfriend Mary (the insistence on the “M”) in her “new home”. The short deals with initiation into the sect; the feature with the consequences of staying and fleeing. With few resources, Durkin manages to film in quite a sophisticated way (alternating fixed and panoramic shots with a handheld camera whose mobility reminding us of a home video suggests the atmosphere of a thriller later confirmed in the feature). On the other hand, the excellent treatment of sound contributes to the feeling that “something’s wrong”, sensed from the very beginning (the mobile phone that disappears, the boy’s indifference towards that fact…). Also similarly to the feature, we see already here the interest in the landscape – both filmic and programmatically speaking – in the sense that, filming rurality, Durkin delves into the heart of traditionalist and conservative America, in order to question a whole country and its mythology. In a way, he ends up confusing the viewer by concentrating in the same geographical and mythological space (that rurality) the “old America” and the sects with apparently opposed philosophies of life (anti-materialism, self-management, free love). (FN)