Day 179: Sound of My Voice

A couple infiltrate a cult in order to expose them and potentially stop them from doing anything harmful to themselves or others. The leader, Maggie (Brit Marling), claims she is from the year 2054 and she offers peace and understanding to her followers.

Cults just seem fascinating. Strangers come together and share something so intimate with each other, all from a common belief. The depictions of cults that I’ve seen in fiction all seem to have quite close relationships between their members. They seem to offer that closeness that we can so often lack in our normal lives and it makes sense that people would be drawn to them. And it allows them to give up control. People claim to want freedom and to be in control of their own lives, but when it comes down to it, I’m pretty sure people would give up that control if it meant they’d be looked after. There is a freedom in having to make no choices and having absolutely no responsibilities. I’d argue that’s one of the main reasons children can enjoy themselves. They don’t have to plan ahead and sacrifice something they want for something they need. They have no control and they’re happier for it. I’m not saying we’d all be happy if we were completely restricted in everything we could do. We’d need the illusion of control otherwise we’d fight against it. In ‘The Fat Years’ (a book that explores China and its government), the author says that, given a choice, people will choose dictatorship over chaos. If our future is uncertain, we look for someone to help put it in order. We want to relinquish the demands placed upon us but at the same time we want to believe we chose that for ourselves. And I think that’s where cults shine.

This film was really well done. I like that we don’t know if she is actually a fraud or if she’s from the future. It was interesting to see the change in the couple who infiltrated the cult. Peter (Christopher Denham) was determined to expose the leader as a fraud but he became mesmerised by her after a few sessions. She had a way of seeming to understand what her followers kept within themselves and she managed to bring it out of them so that they could be free of what was trapping them. After helping Peter to confront his childhood trauma, you can see the change in him. He now wants to go to the sessions, not necessarily to help expose the cult, but in order to learn from Maggie. His girlfriend, Lorna (Nicole Vicius), originally seems to believe that Maggie may be who she says she is but after it becomes clear that Peter has been sucked into their world, she doubts the group and helps to bring Maggie down. Sometimes when the group was meeting, it all seemed so peaceful and I kind of understood how someone could willingly spend their time there. It scares me how easy it would probably be for me to join a cult.

8/10