Watch the First 12 Minutes of Sound of My Voice: Brit Marling and Cult Jam

Festival darling Brit Marling burst onto the scene last summer with the sci-fi indie Another Earth (and will be seen in the upcoming fiscal thriller Arbitrage opposite Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon), but her turn as a mysterious cult leader in this April’s Sound of My Voice is the more impressive introduction to the charismatic up and comer. Hit the jump to watch the first 10 minutes of Sound of My Voice, courtesy of Fox Searchlight, and see for yourself.

As seen in the opening 10 minutes, Sound of My Voice follows a couple (Nicole Vicius and Christopher Denham) as they infiltrate a secretive cult, intending to film a documentary exposing its leader as a fraud. But when they meet said leader — in the form of Marling’s Maggie, a young woman who claims to be from the future — they fall deeper in than they ever imagined they would.

Sound of My Voice, directed by Zal Batmanglij, is the second of Marling‘s Sundance 2011 pics to hit screens following Mike Cahill’s Another Earth; both were co-written by Marling and screened to acclaim on the festival circuit.

Shot on a tiny budget, SOMV pulls off a tremendous amount with very little in the way of the kind of resources available to most science fiction films, and like Another Earth it’s very much an intimate-scale indie that builds a greater sense for the world around it. But between the two — not to invite comparison, but it inevitably happens — SOMV allows Marling to flex her acting muscles with one of the more complex and layered female characters in to come along in a while. That alone will be worth the price of admission come April 27.

Fox Searchlight, meanwhile, needs to figure out a way to push SOMV farther than it did Another Earth, which suffered from a lack of clarity in its marketing materials and opened to disappointing box office, even for an admittedly small-scale film with no stars. This first-10-minutes clip is a good start; not only does it draw you in to the plot of SOMV and give you a sense of Batmanglij’s shrewd directing style and the magnetic allure of Marling as Maggie, it also features a handful of “interactive” bonus features that click away to expand on ideas and concepts in the film, including viral clips like this.

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