I do love me a good cult; and the weirder they are, the more deranged, the more coercive, mind-erasing, wallet-draining, sexually absolutist and murderous they are, and the more they lure their members into a realm of cheap burberry handbags isolation, rote repetition, low-protein diets, 36-hour work shifts, constant exhaustion and the ever-present fear of public shaming or shunning over some minute dogmatic or ideological shortcoming, oh, the better I like them.Mind you, I take a pretty ecumenical definition of what a cult is. The Moonies, the Manson Family, Jonestown, and the Scientologists? Sure, but also the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Nation Of Islam; the Nazis; the Baader-Meinhof gang; the mass-suicidal castrati of the Heaven's Gate cult; and the followers of Ayn Rand, who was to American philosophy what Scientology's L Ron Hubbard was to religion.You almost daren't make these people up (with all due respect to The Simpsons' classic "Movementarians" episode, The Joy Of Sect), and you often can't safely represent them on film or TV in case they sue you. Because the one thing every up-and-coming cult has – apart from an aggressive drug-rehab programme that builds a sturdy base of grateful enforcers – is an all-rottweiler legal affairs department. Just ask Hubbard biographer Russell Miller the ends those guys used to go to.The Hubbardites will certainly have things to say about Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming film The Master (due in UK cinemas on 9 Nov), a fictionalised retelling of Hubbard's emergence in 1950s Los Angeles. Anderson has gone so far as to screen the movie for Tom Cruise, Scientology's chief emissary to the normals. That suggests the Church is anxious to play nice, advise on potential conflicts, and have nothing to fight about when it's released; the less publicity the better, as the rapid Holmes-Cruise reverse-nuptial settlement suggested.A cult movie Ferragamo handbags that can create its own convincing cult, though, is an achievement in itself, because it's so hard to outdo the real ones. Sound Of My Voice, like Martha Marcy May Marlene (which had a more violent, sex-based cult), does just that. Coming on the heels of its co-writer and star Brit Marling's haunting sci-fi drama Another Earth, it suggests there's an auteur in the making here.Marling plays a woman who claims to have arrived from the year 2054, and two investigative journalists try to infiltrate her group. Like many cults, with their little green men origin myths, Sound Of My Voice walks a fine line between religion and science-fiction, building doubts as to whether or not Marling is what she says she is. The rituals are convincing: puking-purging, "cleansing", plus a secret handshake straight out of a Three Stooges slapfest. But the heart of the drama – could she be? – offers suspense, misdirection, doubts upon doubts, and, with one truly shocking development, casts an unsettlingly ambiguous afterglow in the mind. I have my eye on Brit Marling.