Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The mystique surrounding the new Netflix miniseries The OA comes on a few levels. Primarily, of course, is that it’s a mystery series that kicks off with the return of a young woman who’d been missing for seven years, and when she returns, she’s no longer blind like she was. Within the box of that mystery, then, is the question of what happened to her while she was gone, how can she see now, why does she call herself “The OA,” and why has she gathered a group of five misfits together to form a storytelling coven in an abandoned housing development? The series is filmed in a kind of misty dreamscape already, and that’s before it decides to dip its toe into more celestial waters.
But that mystique also extends to the creators behind the scenes. For most viewers, the prospect of a Netflix miniseries from writers/producers Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij doesn’t really mean much. But for the past five years, these two have been cultivating their own niche-within-a-niche in the indie film landscape, keeping mostly to themselves and crafting a filmography that feels thematically consistent and yet adventurous at the same time. Unlike the other indie stars of this generation — the group growing out of the interconnected Duplass/Swanberg/Bujalski/Wingard family tree — Marling and Batmanglij don’t belong to a greater collective. Marling occasionally acts in projects that she hasn’t developed — check out the Civil War home invasion thriller The Keeping Room for one particularly good example — but mostly they do their own thing. And despite the fact that their movies tend to stay well below the radar, safe from breaking out into the mainstream, theirs are come of the most interesting indie movies to have emerged in the past five years.
If The OA is currently piquing your interest in the Marling/Batmanglij team, now is the perfect time to dive into their filmography.
Another Earth
When Another Earth premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Brit Marling was a complete unknown. She’s been able to brand herself pretty well as an iconoclast among her peers from pretty much day one — she was an analyst at Goldman Sachs for a year before deciding to eschew the financial sector and make movies — but with Another Earth, she was merely one of dozens trying to get some Park City love for her movie. Another Earth did get that attention, though, and it set the tone for the kind of emotional sci-fi that we’re getting in The OA. Marling plays a young woman ravaged with guilt who becomes fascinated with the discovery of a mirror-Earth planet. As with everything else in the Marling Cinematic Universe, it’s idea-heavy and atmospheric in its execution. Marling co-wrote the film with Mike Cahill, who directed. Cahill, Marling, and Batmanglij all go back to their days at Georgetown together, and it was Cahill who later directed Marling in the not-very-well-received I Origins, another movie that put its big ideas well out in front of its execution. Another Earth was a big breakthrough, including two Independent Spirit Award nominations (Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay), but it’s bested from a quality standpoint by Marling’s next two films.
[Where to stream Another Earth]
Sound of My Voice
Marling co-wrote this script with Batmanglij, who also directed, in his feature-film debut. Marling stars in the film as a cult leader whose group is being infiltrated by a documentary filmmaker (and, as we discover later, bt the FBI). Marling gives a career-best performance here, playing a woman who is simultaneously alluring, fascinating, comforting, and cruel, but whose dispassionate delivery manages to make her even more compelling. As with all of her movies, this one makes for a cool companion piece to The OA, considering that in both she’s playing a figure who is able to draw people to her despite the fact that all reason says she’s a crazy person. By all Hollywood standards, Brit Marling fits the typical bill of a starlet: beautiful, thin, blonde. That she uses this adherence to accepted standards of beauty to play characters who lure others to them for purposes either nefarious or mystical is one of the more satisfying bait-and-switches happening in movies today. Sound of My Voice remains the most effective movie in the Marling/Batmanglij/Cahill micro-genre, if only for how it hold the audience firmly in its thrall before snatching their breath away in the final minutes. (This was also something that Another Earth attempted, if less effectively.)
[Where to stream Sound of My Voice]
The East
The most mainstream film in the Marling/Batmanglij micro-genre, The East attracted a cast of name actors — Ellen Page, Alexander Skarsgard, Patricia Clarkson — to tell a story that again feels connected to the others in many ways. It’s another cult story, or at least another story about a collective gathered under a charismatic leader (Skarsgard). This time, it’s a group of freegan anarchists who carry out actions against corporate criminals. In a swerve away from her Sound of My Voice role, Marling plays the federal-agent infiltrator in this one, ultimately falling in with Skarsgard and Page as the anarchists. See this one if only to see Ellen Page fully able to indulge in same-sex chemistry as part of what is easily her best performance since Juno. But while the cast might be glitzier this time, the core of the movie remains within the Marling/Batmanglij collective.
It’s fascinating and appropriate that Marling and Batmanglij keep making movies about closed-off organizations and secret collectives, if only because their filmmaking has that same sense of self-seclusion and insularity. And while insularity can often be a detriment to a filmmaker — keeping audiences at arm’s length without an ability to connect to universal truths — in the case of these films, it gives the universe its own unique orbit. These films feel unsettling even when nothing particularly disturbing is happening, because they’re happening in a world that’s not ours. It’s theirs. We’re getting a peek inside, but that world is never really our own.
