What Marielle Knows review – teenager’s telepathic powers reveal parents’ secrets and lies
In this fantasy-satire of bourgeois family life, a girl is suddenly able to see everything her messed-up parents are up to
Here is a high-concept satire of bourgeois family life with all its secrets and lies from German film-maker Frédéric Hambalek; it is something to remind you of the notorious Babel fish in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which you can put in your ear and then comprehend what any creature in the universe is saying — a miraculous promotion of pure understanding which has been the cause of more and bloodier wars than anything else.
Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) is a moody and withdrawn teenager with messed-up parents. Her mum is Julia (Julia Jentsch, who 20 years ago memorably played anti-Nazi martyr Sophie Scholl) and dad is Tobias (Felix Kramer). Julia is on the verge of a furtive affair with work colleague Max (Mehmet Ateşçi) while Tobias is being turned into a beta-male joke at his publishing company – his cover design choice for a new novel is scorned by his underlings, and he’s particularly undermined by a supercilious smoothie called Sören (Moritz Treuenfels).
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