Sound of My Voice

 Peter (Christopher Denham), a schoolteacher, and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius), a would-be writer, infiltrate a cult to expose the leader as a fraud and make an indie documentary about it. What could possibly go wrong?

 Less than you'd expect, actually! For a while, at least. It's very much not the same type of cult featured in, say, Martha Marcy May Marlene (both films were shown in Sundance in 2011). This is a more urbane cult, one that gathers only some nights, and the methods used to lead the faithful to their secret base are immediately engaging: vans, blindfolds and restraints, different suburban kitchens and garages, a secret handshake; All leading to the same basement, night after night. There the believers - and our infiltrators - finally get to meet Maggie (Brit Marling), a woman who claims to come from 2054.

 Maggie is softspoken, magnetic, has a flair for the theatrical and even dresses like a cult leader. She says she's preparing her flock for hardships to come, but it doesn't help her credibility that some of the stuff she makes her believers engage in seem distinctly culty: making them let go of their inhibitions, psychological deconstruction, and subjecting them to exhaustion and fasting. Oh, and she kicks out someone who asks Maggie for some future facts to prove she's actually a time traveller; Big red flag right there, if you ask me. An even bigger warning sign: Maggie soon asks one of our protagonists to do something incredibly suspect. By that point, though, they're wrapped up in the cult's mind games.

 Director Zal Batmanglij uses numbered chapter headers and frequent montages to give the story a sense of a relentless flow even when not a lot is happening. His brother Rostam provides the soundtrack, which is as good (if not as catchy) as you'd expect from one of the driving forces behind Vampire Weekend.

 The script, written by the director and Marling, expertly balances between supporting Maggie's claims and portraying the whole thing as a con until fairly late in the game. Personally I don't particularly care for where things end up (it's a bit of a common place in this sort of thing), but it undeniably has a pretty clever way of revealing it. I guess the fact that this was the first part of a proposed trilogy (thank you, IMDB trivia!) kind of gives the game away.
 Still; ending quibbles aside, it's deceptively pacey, dialog-driven cult thriller, carefully constructed around the limitations of its budget and with a strong central performance from Marling. Well worth a watch.