A Darkly Clever German Fam-Com

Like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie co-directed with M. Night Shyamalan, the dark supernatural satire What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle weiss) takes a Hollywood high concept and turns it into a scathing comedy about a bourgeois family in deep crisis.

This second feature from German writer-director Frédéric Hambalek is a big step up from his no-budget debut, Model Olimpia, which mined similar conceptual terrain. Sharply designed and well-performed, if a bit thin in the long run, the film premiered in competition at the Berlinale, where it could spark interest among high-end arthouse distributors. It also has some remake potential — although a broader, more audience-friendly version would probably have to remove all the graphic sex talk and child-slapping.

If the pitch behind Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense can be summed up by the famous line “I see dead people,” the major twist in What Marielle Knows, which occurs at the very start of the movie, would be something like: “I see everything my parents do.”

This inexplicable phenomenon befalls the film’s titular teenage girl (Laeni Geiseler) after she’s smacked in the face by her best friend. Suddenly, Marielle has the power to see and hear what her mother, Julia (Julia Jentsch), and father, Tobias (Felix Kramer), are doing, whether they’re off at work, driving around town or in the bedroom with the door closed.

If this were some kind of picture-perfect family, the Twilight Zone-style event would already pose major problems. But Marielle’s folks are far from ideal, even if on the surface they lead fairly normal lives, with a big modern suburban home and successful, well-paying executive jobs.

Behind that cheery facade, Julia has actually been involved in some heavy flirting (and by heavy, I mean hard-R rated) with a colleague at work (Mehmet Atesci). Meanwhile, Tobias is unable to stand up to the marketing team he leads at a publishing company, getting humiliated in a meeting that leaves him powerless. On the surface the couple keeps pretending that all is well, but when their daughter explains she now has X-ray vision to see into their lives, they’re forced to adapt their behavior accordingly.

This causes all kinds of darkly comic and dramatic moments while raising some interesting questions: Are we the same people both inside and outside the family unit? What does it mean to be true to yourself, as Julia keeps saying they should be, if the truth could wind up hurting those you love? Is life just one big performance where we’re pretending to be somebody else all the time?

The fact that Marielle can now openly judge whatever her parents are doing makes them react with both fear and loathing. First, they try to behave better, or at least pretend to, but that only makes things worse. Then they reject the whole situation by doubling down on their transgressions — whether it’s Julia taking her office fling way too far or Tobias trying to assert his power at the company, only to have it backfire on him in a bad way.

Hambalek paces the action well, allowing things to convincingly snowball as the family gets more unhinged and miserable. He also mines his concept for a few good laughs, including a bit where Julia and Tobias speak in French because they know their daughter won’t understand them in another langauge, which is something lots of parents do in the real world.

What Marielle Knows is basically a high-concept social experiment designed to prove how our private lives are probably best kept private. It’s not a groundbreaking idea, but the film uses its clever conceit to remind us how important that is, especially at a time when people advertise their every thought and action on social media. (At some point, Marielle’s parents are convinced she pirated their phones in order to spy on them.)

Where the film feels underdeveloped is in the plotline involving Marielle herself. She never comes across as a real character, but more like a cipher for all the hijinks to play out. There are some hints her parents may have been neglectful towards her, though their relationship doesn’t seem problematic enough when the action kicks off. And while mom and dad both have compelling narrative arcs, Marielle doesn’t do much throughout the movie except mope around with her telepathic powers — until a shrewdly open-ended finale leaves us wondering whether such powers will ultimately outlast the story.