My wife and I saw The Sound of My Voice a while ago, at Sunshine Cinema, in a near-empty theater, a short while before the movie exited ignominiously. I guess the audience for this film – the few dozen Brit Marling fanatics, and people who have been duped by a cult fraud of some kind and somehow escaped back to the real world – was just not large enough to keep it going. It’s too bad, really. The Sound of My Voice is a really good film, and in my opinion a very important film.

I’m not a Brit Marling fanatic, exactly, so clearly I went to see the film for reason number two: personal experience with a charismatic fraud. I’m came out of the theater a bit of a Brit Marling fanatic, however! I feel she is one of the bright new lights in cinema right now. Marling’s Another Earth was remarkable, and while Sound of My Voice does not quite equal that film in terms of overall impact, it is still a interesting and well-done movie. It all flows from Marling, who wrote the movie, and delivers a wonderful performance. In the very grim landscape of current movies, Brit Marling is definitely a shining star of hope. Don’t miss anything she does!

Here’s what is so great about this film. It’s easy to make a film about an over-the-top cult; anyone can do that, hell, Wanderlust did that. What Marling did is make a film that captures how charismatic frauds really operate. I feel this is an important contribution to our society given the pervasive and pernicious influence in the United States of the cult of positive thinking and the incredible number of internet frauds who are supposedly are in the business of helping people “realize their dreams,” but who are actually in the business of systematically impairing and breaking down their client’s critical thinking apparatus, instilling in them what might be called a positivity trance, and linking it directly to sizable monthly payments from the client to them!

I have had brief but direct experience with a classic fraud of this kind; I’ll spare you the details, except to mention that it involved positive thinking / “law of attraction” based business coaching. I can tell you that Marling captures beautifully many of the techniques used to manipulate people and break down their rationality. They very explicitly target audiences that they know will be susceptible. They purposely have an extended process by which people have to clear certain hurdles to gain access to the group. They always begin with telling “their story,” in which they stir emotions in a way that beings to undermine their audience’s sense of reality. They build a seductive sense of community by playing everyone off each other skillfully and nefariously. They use aggression and humiliation alternated with empowerment rhetoric to crush critical thought. And the moment anyone figures out their game, they immediately shove them out the door, so as to not corrupt the trance state of the remaining people. The various scenes with Marling and the group demonstrating each of these techniques are done simply and honestly, and are in my experience extremely realistic.

I also have tremendous respect for the ending of this film. On the surface, it seems like the ending is intentionally ambiguous, but then we realize that in the process of watching the fraud operate over the course of the film our ability to think critically about the situation portrayed has actually been developed a bit, and it retrospectively becomes clear that the shocking incident between Marling and the young girl does in fact have a completely rational and obvious explanation: namely, that the group had been researching and studying the young girl for a long time, just as they had extensively researched and studied the couple themselves (as portrayed in the film’s opening footage.) Most films nowadays are pretty damn intellectually feeble, so to experience this kind of realization as an aftertaste as you leave the theater is indicative of some really fine writing, in my opinion.

I very highly recommend The Sound of My Voice!

And I should mention that Brit Marling  has a film coming out called The East about a person who infiltrates an Anarchist group, and which features not only Marling, but the amazing Patricia Clarkson and the long lost megastar-that-never-was Julia Ormond! In Marling’s hands, I expect this to be nothing less than fabulous. Be on the lookout for it!