Marionette (2020) poster

Marionette (2020)

Rating:


Netherlands/UK/Luxembourg. 2020.

Crew

Director – Elbert Van Strien, Screenplay – Ben Hopkins & Elbert Van Strien, Based on a Short Film by Elbert Van Strien, Producers – Burny Bos, Claudia Brandt & Elbert Van Strien, Photography – Guido Van Gennep, Music – Han Otten & Maurits Overdulve, Visual Effects Supervisors – Pepijn Schroeijers & Albert Van Vuure, Visual Effects – Planet X, Special Effects – AX-7 Special Effects (Supervisor – Ken Fitzke), Makeup Effects – Unreal (Carola Brockhoff & Rogier Samuels), Production Design – Anne Winterink. Production Company – Accento Films/BosBros/Samsa Film/Black Camel Pictures.

Cast

Thekla Reuten (Dr Marianne Winter), Elijah Wolf (Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Craig), Emun Elliott (Kieran), Sam Hazeldine (Josh), Dawn Steele (Tina), Rebecca Front (Dr Maureen ‘Mo’ Clarke), Bill Paterson (Dr Mandelnaum), Peter Mullan (Dr Albert McVittie)


Plot

Psychiatrist Marianne Winter takes a new job at a facility in Scotland following the death of her husband Josh in a car accident. There she is assigned the strange boy Manny Craig who rarely speaks. Manny tells her that his drawings can make things come true. He seems to predict an accident she witnesses and then cause a gun to appear in her desk drawer. As Manny then predicts the death of Kieran, a guy she has started to see, Marianne becomes obsessed with knowing who Manny is and the strange power he has.


Marionette was the second film for Dutch director Elbert Van Strien. Van Strien had previously made the horror film Two Eyes Staring (2010), which had gained reasonable acclaim and was at one point slated for an English-language remake.

This starts out as a potentially intriguing horror or possibly fantasy premise – Thekla Reuten is a new psychiatrist at a forbidding hospital in a dour Scottish nowhere town. One of her patients is a boy (Elijah Wolf) who appears to have the ability to make things happen with his drawings – he causes a gun to manifest in her desk and then may appear to either cause or predict the death of Emun Elliott, the man she becomes involved with, by drowning at sea. This is a premise that starts to go in the direction of films like Paperhouse (1989) and Before I Wake (2016). Or even the It’s a Good Life segment of The Twilight Zone (1959-63), later remade by Joe Dante in Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983).

Elbert Van Strien conducts these scenes with an atmosphere that cannot be faulted and makes fine use of the Scottish locations. You keep wanting to see more of the kid’s abilities to predict/create events but it soon turns out that that is not what the film is about. There is the fine scene where Thekla Reuten attempts to prevent the predicted fate for Emun Elliott by untying his boat so that he can’t drown in it – only to realise that he was inside and this was what caused him to drown. This comes amid interesting discussion at her book group about free will and the nature of Schrodinger’s Cat.

Thekla Reuten and Elijah Wolf in Marionette (2020)
Psychiatrist Thekla Reuten and mystery child Elijah Wolf

The film then goes completely sideways into an Alternate Timeline scenario of sorts where Elijah Wolf challenges Thelka Reuten that he can destroy everything and she won’t exist if she shoots him. She wakes up to find herself in a world where her husband Sam Hazeldine was never killed and they are still together, while nobody in Scotland recognises her.

Things get even weirder when it comes to an ending [PLOT SPOILERS] where it would seem to appear that Elijah Wolf is the one who is mourning the deaths of his parents and that she and all the other versions of reality are Imaginary Companions that he has created in his head. This seems a Conceptual Reversal Twist of the most contrived order – it seems hard to believe that a young boy would have the capacity to create emotionally complex adult relationships let alone engage in philosophical debates about free will.


Trailer here


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