It all starts with a slap. After getting into a fight at school, Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) spontaneously develops the capacity to eavesdrop on her parents’ lives. Whether the teenage girl wants to or not, she can sense what her mom and dad are doing at every moment — an uncanny (and highly inconvenient) ability that disrupts the tidy sense of mutual respect her family had been maintaining until that point. Come to find, most of the things Julia (Julia Jentsch) and Tobias (Felix Kramer) tell one another around the kitchen table aren’t true, a subtle yet essential observation keenly revealed by “What Marielle Knows.”
In nearly all families, it’s the adults who have the upper hand, monitoring how their children behave, while carefully filtering which details they choose to share. But in writer-director Frédéric Hambalek’s intriguing thought experiment, that dynamic is reversed, and a young girl inexplicably gains the upper hand, serving as conscience, confessor and ultimately mirror to her parents’ true selves. Often comical and sometimes scary, the concept should travel well beyond Germany (where the film premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival), even if Hambalek hasn’t ironed out all the kinks.
Just think: What if, when you came home and described your day, your child already knew every detail, and impatiently corrected the parts you’d polished to make yourself sound better? To the extent that you’d been their hero before, would all of that crumble if they could see the imperfect and occasionally pathetic choices you’d made at work? Tobias reacts by denying everything when Marielle informs him that an office meeting didn’t happen the way he tells it. Meanwhile, Julia bites her tongue, nervous that her daughter must have seen the way she and her frisky co-worker Max (Mehmet Ateşçi) were talking during their smoke break.
One can only imagine how overwhelming all this must be for Marielle, though Hambalek approaches the premise mostly from the parents’ perspective, inviting fellow adults to consider how they might respond to such a predicament. Tobias (who’s first introduced talking marketing strategies for his publishing company) spends so much time spinning things that he sincerely believes his own lies — and refuses to accept the truth when Marielle reflects it back at him. Julia knows better, but errs on the side of caution, since the rules aren’t clear to her — or us, for that matter.
If this is some kind of telepathy, how does it work exactly? Can Marielle access her parents’ thoughts and feelings, or is she simply listening in on what they say? It’s not until both Julia and Tobias have accepted Marielle’s claims that the situation really start to get interesting, as nothing they do is secret. Marielle already busted Julia’s illicit smoking habit. What if she spills details of her mom’s flirty conversations with Max? Tobias takes the opportunity to be more of a role model, replaying the earlier meeting the way he wishes it would have gone (by standing up to an ambitious colleague, played by Moritz Treuenfels) for Marielle’s benefit — though that only makes things worse for him at work.
Behind the camera, Hambalek practices a serviceable but not especially stylish technique, creating plausible sets (the posh modern home, the impersonal office spaces) and then placing the camera wherever necessary to document his characters’ discomfort. Ironically, the professional spaces are full of glass walls, making privacy scarce, while there are plenty of doors and quiet corners at home, as if it were designed to interfere with open communication.
It’s fun to imagine what an American remake might do with the idea, especially given all the “Freaky Friday”-style body-swap movies Disney and company used to produce. Whereas Hollywood studios have a bad habit of dumbing everything down to a 13-year-old sensibility, the strength of Hambalek’s German approach is that it doesn’t shy away from the cringey moments, as when Julia and Tobias talk openly about her feelings for Max.
The movie could have used just a bit more clarity about what’s going on — not how Marielle came by her ability, but what it entails — since the grown-ups’ attempts to manage it don’t always make sense. For example, it’s amusing to watch the adults switch to French when trying to have a private conversation … but would that really work, if Marielle feels what they do? And if the latter is true, then there are a whole lot of things few parents are prepared to tell their adolescent children that Marielle is now privy to.
Still, it’s fun to watch all three characters navigate uncharted territory, forced to confront the everyday deceptions and hypocrisies. Jentsch (who comes across like Germany’s answer to Blanche Gardin or Janeane Garofalo) communicates Julia’s insecurities especially well in close-up, while young Geiseler remains inscrutable throughout. Marielle cries constantly, but it’s hard to know what she’s thinking — or how much she knows, exactly. The movie keeps cutting back to the girl’s face, as if to underscore the God-like power she now holds over her parents. The girl’s skill/curse seems to have shattered so many of the illusions this family holds, although Hambalek picks a perfect truth on which to end.
