‘What Marielle Knows’ movie review: a clever, yet underbaked subversion of raunchy comedy
It’s not unusual for an independent film to struggle connecting with global audiences, which is why, despite earning positive responses when it debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival last February, What Marielle Knows has yet to find a distributor for English-language territories, but it is actually commercially viable because of its clever use of perspective.
The greatest challenge in making a film from the perspective of a child is exploring what thoughts occupy the mind of a young person, and although there are brilliant casting directors who can draw out exceptional performances from children with next to no experience within the industry, a film’s script has to acknowledge the haphazard ways in which they perceive information.
To thoroughly imagine what children think about may actually not be that interesting, which is why What Marielle Knows is so clever with its fantastical concept. By giving its titular character specific knowledge, the film puts the pressure on its adult characters to justify themselves.
The film follows Julia Jentsch’s Julia and Felix Krammer’s Tobias, who are on the verge of splitting their marriage of nearly a decade, wherein the former is having an affair with her work colleague, Max, played by Mehmet Ateşçi, and the latter has been struggling in his own profession after being undermined by the new hire Sören, played by Moritz Treuenfels.
Their respective struggles blind them to the distress felt by their young daughter, Marielle, portrayed by Laeni Geiseler, who is bruised after being smacked in the face by a classmate, which, in a high-concept twist reminiscent of The Twilight Zone, leads her to gain the ability to see and hear everything that her parents are doing, an outcome both distressing and disappointing.
Telepathic powers aren’t anything new when it comes to supernatural coming-of-age stories, a territory as classic as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and has been reinvented recently with Joaquim Trier’s underrated Thelma. However, Marielle’s powers are limited in scope because they are only about her parents; serving ironically as the only thing that is keeping them together, she is also used as a baton as both Julia and Tobias try to acquire information about one another. It’s an amusing means of showing to Marielle, a child who is told that she needs to be more mature, that grown-ups are really just as petty as her classmates are.
A debate about honesty is at the heart of the film as it examines the degree of truthfulness critical to be both compassionate and considerate. Both of Marielle’s parents would have initially agreed that they should withhold certain information about themselves from their daughter until she is grown up enough to understand them, but they’re caught flat-footed when her knowledge surpasses both of them.
Marielle finds that the apathy that her parents have shown for one another really has nothing to do with their personal grievances: Julia pursued an affair so that she would be seen, and Tobias’ work depression is a result of his declining self-esteem. The comedy comes from the parents’ investigation into how honest their daughter is, such that, while they are more confident when she’s revealing truths about them, neither Julia nor Tobias would know if she is being honest when describing the other.
What Marielle Knows could have been positioned as a high-concept family comedy in the vein of Freaky Friday or Big, in which a child is granted adult responsibilities, but director Frédéric Hambalek goes in a decidedly R-rated direction. Marielle’s growing awareness of her parents’ sexual proclivities result in some brilliantly uncomfortable instances of cringe comedy, as the film lingers in it long enough to examine its potential long-term consequences; should Julia have to deal with her daughter’s watchful presence for much longer, she would have to choose between having a frank conversion about sex with her or becoming celibate forever. On the other hand, although it’s a joke that the film leans into a bit too much, the more emotional storyline involving Tobias’ mental health results in some surprisingly thoughtful moments of parental bonding.
The concept of What Marielle Knows has so much potential that its choice of medium feels a bit unusual, where it’s easier to imagine a short film or a multi-part limited series about the same subject, because an 86-minute feature feels both too narrow to be all-encompassing and too expansive to be streamlined to its best jokes. Nonetheless, it’s easy to forgive the film’s flaws given the trio of excellent performances from the nuclear family unit, which are so lived-in and authentic that even without the supernatural gimmick, it’s easy to imagine them playing the same roles in a more straightforward family dramedy.
