Short of the Week

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Drama Sean Durkin
ma

Mary Last Seen

A young woman embarks on a road trip with her boyfriend to a place he promises to be beautiful and peaceful. But a series of strange events occur on their journey, and it becomes clear that their relationship is not what she thinks and their destination is not what was promised.

Play
Drama Sean Durkin
ma

Mary Last Seen

A young woman embarks on a road trip with her boyfriend to a place he promises to be beautiful and peaceful. But a series of strange events occur on their journey, and it becomes clear that their relationship is not what she thinks and their destination is not what was promised.
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Mary Last Seen

Drama about Community in Live-Action
Directed By Sean Durkin
Produced By Borderline films
Made In USA

With Sean Durkin’s latest feature, The Nest, finally hitting cinema screens here in the UK, we take a look back at a defining moment in the director’s career, his 2010 short Mary Last Seen. The 14-minute short follows a young couple on a road trip to a mysterious place and acts as a prequel to Durkin’s critically acclaimed debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Following a young couple, played by Alexia Rasmussen and Brady Corbet, on a road trip to an unnamed location, we get an indication that something isn’t quite right with their relationship when he gets rid of her phone as she’s taking a bathroom break. As their journey continues and we witness the tension between the pair increase, and you fear the worst when they stop at their “destination” and he leads her into the woods. Although the worst doesn’t happen and they do finally reach this isolated haven—a picturesque farmstead in the middle of nowhere—all is certainly not as he promised.

10 years on, it can be hard to recall the fervor that Martha Marcy May Marlene elicited at the time of its debut. One of the most buzzed-about titles at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Durkin was the breakout star of the fest, taking home the U.S. Director’s prize, and the film was a high-profile acquisition by Fox Searchlight. The feature then played Cannes Un Certain Regard one year after its prequel short won the top short prize at the festival’s Director’s Fortnight. While hardly a smash hit at the box office, the film earned a more than respectable $5.4M in a limited release later that year and featured on a host of critic top-ten lists, including being tabbed as the Best Film of Year by the Associated Press. Its legacy has endured as a cult favorite, though it may be best remembered now as the coming-out-party for its talented lead actress, Elizabeth Olsen, who is now a global star in the Marvel-verse for her role in The Avengers films and the Disney+ show Wandavision. 

As the buzz for Martha Marcy May Marlene percolated, Mary Last Seen briefly took on a mythic quality rare for shorts. Though it was hardly locked away, it was not widely accessible either, and viewers intrigued by this loosely-related origin story could, for a while, only catch the film at special repertory screenings and a smattering of special programs both online and off. The acclaim of its related feature combined with scarcity made the film a unique object of affection and street cred for a certain type of cinephile, ensuring that the short would also live on, with a secure legacy of its own. 

Although it works as a standalone short, it’s clear for anyone who’s seen Martha Marcy May Marlene how Mary Last Seen ties into that narrative and that world, and the short was an important step in Durkin’s process to getting his feature made. As he explains in a Q&A he did about the short at New York’s Lincoln Center:

I had been writing Martha for a few years. In 2009, we were talking about making it, but the film wasn’t really ready. I hadn’t directed a short in a few years, and I wanted something to send out with the script, that was representative of what we wanted to do. In writing Martha, I had done all this research into how you get into cults, and what the induction process is like. So the idea of how a girl gets to be in a cult, that’s how we came up with Mary.

A quiet, confident short full of mystery and intrigue, Mary Last Seen is very different from what we usually refer to as a proof-of-concept, but it’s easy to see how after watching the short audiences would want to know more and investors could see development potential. With the success of the feature, whoever took that risk on Durkin and his crew must surely be satisfied with that decision.

Since releasing the short in 2010 and the feature in 2011, Durkin’s directorial career hasn’t exactly been prolific, with his only other directing credits being the outstanding mini-series Southcliffe (2013) and his latest feature The Nest (2020). However, as part of Borderline Films, along with fellow filmmakers Josh Mond and Antonio Campos, Durkin has an impressive list of producer credits, including Locarno and Sundance winner, James White, and fellow S/W pick Karaoke!.