Elizabeth “Lizzie” Olsen, little sister to Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen), covers the October issue of Nylon. While the cover itself isn’t terrible (by Nylon standards), I’m feeling entirely underwhelmed by the photoshoot within, which is a shame because the magazine did a pretty good job last month with Christina Ricci’s shoot. Where Lizzie is concerned, however, the styling is pretty awful and favors animal print pants and cutoffs and leggings paired with boxy blazers.

Even more troubling than the styling is the fact that the photographs themselves are so heavily airbrushed that Olsen has been rendered virtually unrecognizable from both candid shots and film stills of Martha Marcy May Marlene, which is the movie being promoted here:

Olsen first read the script for Martha Marcy May Marlene when she was in upstate New York filming Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding with Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Catherine Keener (it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September). “It was a really interesting feeling, where I felt like I knew how to approach this. This doesn’t happen too often with me.” In Martha, directed by 29-year-old Sean Durkin, a member of a Brooklyn-based trio of filmmakers called Borderline Films, Olsen plays Martha, a young girl who ends up in a cult, where she is drugged, raped, and held in a state of servitude with a number of other women who are shared between a group of men on a remote farm in the Catskills. When she escapes to a lake house rented for the summer by her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her over-worked architect husband Ted (Hugh Dancy), she is haunted by her time on the farm, unable to talk about the experiences, which are gradually revealed in increasingly horrific flashbacks. Olsen’s performance is a tour de force and after the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January (where Durkin won the U.S. Directing Award), word of it spread around Park City with the same fervor that news of Carey Mulligan’s turn as Jenny Mellor in An Education did in 2009. Olsen is in almost every frame and inhabits the role with a quiet fragility that is as unsettling as it is mesmerizing. In its sheer emotional impact it’s a performance that is reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence’s in last year’s Winter’s Bone and, like Lawrence, Olsen should receive an Oscar nomination, too.

Hmm. So Lizzie Olsen is being touted as the “next Jennifer Lawrence,” which seems rather premature at best and also a somewhat useless comparison, since Lawrence herself is still taking her own first steps in Hollywood. Still, it’s something of a compliment and testament to indie stars breaking into mainstream film, even though Lizzie may not be interested in becoming an A-lister. She tells GQ that she grew up watching her sisters endure paparazzi hell, which is a huge reason that she became interested in smaller films. Lizzie also discussed Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s “most unnerving scene,” which shows her completely nude as part of a sex ritual with several cult men; she says she had no problem doing the nudity: “The movie wouldn’t have been as disturbing without it. Taking away someone’s sexuality, making it something you don’t even own anymore–that’s the scariest thing.” The movie will receive a limited release by Fox Searchlight on October 21, but I’m betting that all of the buzz will result in a wider release if the box office cooperates.

Photos courtesy of Nylon