Sean Durkin makes ordinary rooms feel unsafe and draws performances that make the fear convincing. We recommend his films, with a reservation: his restraint suits the unease of Martha Marcy May Marlene better than the crowded family story of The Iron Claw.
Fi1m perspective
The lake house in Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) ought to give Martha somewhere to recover after leaving a cult. Durkin keeps her escape and her memories so close together that we cannot settle there either. We were frightened by the way those returns to the past made apparent safety feel temporary. Elizabeth Olsen makes the damage painfully convincing, while Durkin allows ordinary surroundings to become threatening. The repeated shifts can grow predictable, but they do not quite let us relax.
That debut established his interest in people struggling with the demands and damage of belonging to a group. Television work on Southcliffe (2013) came before his second feature, The Nest (2020), a family drama set in 1980s England. The scale is domestic: ambition, lies and a marriage going quietly wrong. His cool distance suits a household where little seems to happen and much is changing.
The Iron Claw (2023), his third feature, asks that approach to accommodate the Von Erich wrestling family. A father wants his sons to win the belt he never won, and Durkin stages the wrestling as work, with matches that seldom thrill. Zac Efron plays Kevin, while Stanley Simons's Mike would rather be in a band. The brothers have distinct temperaments, and Durkin gets performances that make their company worth an evening. Editor Matthew Hannam gives the first hour the patience the material needs.
The difficulty comes when the story begins to hurry through experiences that need more time. Hannam's editing moves from one family misfortune to the next before the previous one has registered, and Durkin's script raises several explanations for the supposed curse without taking a view. We can feel the care for these people, but the pace keeps cutting short our attention to them. A director this attentive to performances should leave more time for us to watch them. Start with Martha Marcy May Marlene if an unsettling thriller is what the evening calls for.
Biography
Sean Durkin is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. He was born on 9 December 1981. His feature debut Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), which he also wrote, premiered at Sundance, where he won the Dramatic Directing Award.
Durkin is known for writing and directing The Nest (2020) and The Iron Claw (2023). He has also directed episodes of the Channel 4 series Southcliffe (2013) and the Amazon Prime Video miniseries Dead Ringers (2023).
