Young film makers Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling know people pretty well. Their new feature Sound of My Voice, which opened in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington on April 27, hit some of our human nails on the head so squarely that you wonder how they came to know so much so soon.

They know, for example, that most of us want to be saved -- from the good life, from the bad life, from our fears, maybe even from our hopes -- it doesn't matter, just save us! And they know that, since we're a little bit ashamed of that desire, messiahs have to be seductive. When this movie's messiah lifts the veil that covers her face, she might as well be our bride.

Her name is Maggie. In order to meet her, Peter and Lorna must drive into a stranger's garage, take off their clothes, shower ("Be thorough with the soap."), put on open-backed hospital gowns, allow themselves to be handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven to another stranger's house. That's quite a commitment, one suffused with erotic undertones -- nudity, bondage, surrender, and a promise that the first night will be unforgettable. Then the beautiful creature appears and proceeds to seduce them by telling a story that leaves her ravished, in effect, wandering through an underworld dressed in nothing but a soiled bed sheet and her hair.

Or she tries to seduce them, but Peter and Lorna have come to Maggie's temple as infiltrators, not as converts. Batmanglij and Marling know that since we're a little bit ashamed of our desire to be delivered, we'll root for anyone who makes an effort to expose a charlatan, especially when doing so seems dangerous. Everybody loves to see a false messiah stripped of her sheep's clothing and left naked on the street, and the film's initial momentum derives from our desire to watch that happen.

Batmanglij and Marling also understand that false-messiah killers are a special kind of hero: the kind that protects us from something we're not sure we want to avoid. Because falling in love with a fantasy feels like falling in love. So when we realize that one of our heroes might be too weak to stand against the power he's trying to protect us from, we're not sure how we feel. We want him to be strong, but we're also glad to see that he's like us: a lesser angel longing for connection to something beyond the pale of what little we can see.

That longing has been with us since we started drawing pictures on the walls of caves, but it's a little embarrassing in the information age, when anything that can't be verified with data is considered bogus.

When Peter falters, the movie's question changes from 'Will the heroes get the proof they need before they're discovered?' to 'Will this hero turn out to be weak like us?' The second question is a lot more interesting than the first one because we're not sure how we want it to be answered. His half-surrender is convincing: sufficiently seduced by magic Maggie to take the step she asks of him, but not with both feet. And it's right that the fallen hero should be Peter rather than Lorna because he was the zealot to begin with, which means that he was the more eager to believe.

Another thing these young film makers know is that "the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants," as Wordsworth said. There's no sex, just a jittery erotic charge. There's no violence, just a suggestion of danger which is heightened by Rostam Batmanglij's score and by the fact that Maggie's followers give her their blood. There's a lot of missing information, but its absence never seems to be a ploy. In fact, there are no tricks of any kind.

In the end the movie says that simple story-telling is what matters, and that the realm of our experience is probably nothing more than the realm of our experience. And it turns our cynical tendency to condemn anything that's not consistent with our limited perspective on its head. The movie knows we want to see Maggie exposed as a charlatan; it knows we want Peter to be punished for falling under her spell; but instead of giving us those satisfactions, it leaves us with a look of wonder on Peter's face.

That's what the word awesome really means.

Sound of My Voice is currently playing at AMC Georgetown and Bethesda Rowe Cinema. It will open in Shirlington on May 4.