'What Marielle Knows' is a Telepathic Tween Nightmare Turned Viciously Funny Family Satire (Tribeca Review)

Didn’t it seem like the ultimate dream when you were a kid—the idea of finally being an adult? The sense of helplessness and lack of agency that we felt seemed so stifling we were fit to burst. Then our parents would inevitably tell us we should cherish our childhoods—that those would be the simplest, happiest times of our lives. Speaking as a perpetually exhausted adult who had a not-great childhood, I feel as if I now can see both sides of that coin, and so here does German writer-director Frédéric Hambalek’s acerbic family satire What Marielle Knows, which mines its brilliant little metaphysical conceit for a world of hilarious cringe that the entire family unit can enjoy.

That conceit goes like this: our story begins one day at school when 11-year-old Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) gets slapped viciously across the face for calling her best friend a slut. It’s no ordinary slap, though—that smack’s a superhero origin story (or supervillain depending on your point of view) because it immediately imbues Marielle with the ability to hear and experience everything that her parents are doing at every single moment of their day.

The movie wisely doesn’t get too lost in the weeds of what this ability actually entails for Marielle—we’re not forced to watch her go into a white-eyed trance or any other silly sci-fi conceit. (And this clever idea for a movie seems ripe for an American remake, one which will no doubt get too obsessed with explaining it all in exhaustive and not-at-all interesting detail.) In Hambalek’s hands, though, it just goes that one night at the dinner table, Marielle unloads on her father, Tobias (Felix Kramer), and mother, Julia (Julia Jentsch), an intimate knowledge of their minute-to-minute happenings. Far, far too intimate. And every question they ask, she has the answer for.

As for dad, Tobias works at an advertising agency where his every proposals are being mocked and undermined by a snide co-worker named Sören (Moritz Treuenfels). That’s not how he details his day to his family, however, where he naturally goes out of his way to make himself look good and powerful and not the ridiculed laughing-stock he really is. Unfortunately, that ego-conserving balloon is popped straight away by Marielle’s newfound power, which Tobias (ever the salesman) reacts to with immediate and emphatic denials. His spin is the truth and nothing but the truth because he’s convinced himself of it, full stop.

Meanwhile, mother Julia has her own secrets — she’s been lying about smoking cigarettes, for one. And for another, it’s a vice she indulges with one of her own coworkers named Max (Mehmet Ateşçi), and as the two lean toward the window puffing away they simultaneously engage in some of the filthiest X-rated sex-talk flirtation this side of a Penthouse Forum. A nice way to kill five minutes, sure, yes, obviously, and absolutely. But not really the sort of behavior you’d want your 11-year-old privy to as she sits silently in homeroom class, I’d wager.

At first, Tobias and Julia think that Marielle must’ve figured out some way to bug them; that perhaps she’s a tech-genius who’s turned their phones into listening devices. It doesn’t take too long to reason out that’s not the case though, so this perfect-from-the-outside family unit finds itself immediately flopped over—the power dynamic fully ass up. How would you behave if your kid knew everything you were doing at every moment? I imagine most parents’ behaviors would have to change, and Tobias and Julia spin off in their own manic directions, trying to find a way forward. After realizing he can’t deny the reality of his daughter’s power, Tobias decides to man up at work in order to get his daughter’s approval and starts asserting himself the way he’d been pretending to do before. Julia also decides to embrace her shadow self, but for her, that takes on more the form of aggressively taunting her ever-present daughter with the complicated truths of what being an adult woman really entails, instead of the lies and fairy tales that she’s been led to believe. (Jentsch is easily the film’s MVP, giving a dark and riotous performance.)

It doesn’t matter what any of them do, though, because What Marielle Knows knows the truth about how our legitimately private selves are not meant for public consumption. It can only lead to ruin. For Marielle too, who’s almost immediately desperate for this unwanted power to go away, becoming crippled with the anxiety of the experience. Seeing straight into the abyss of adulthood, it turns out, ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. And this is probably the first and only movie that will have you feeling okay about rooting for somebody to slap the shit out of their kid, at their kid’s desperate insistence.

Without ever having to be obnoxious or too on-the-nose about it, What Marielle Knows ends up being a keen satire on familial life in the age of social media—we don’t really want to know everything about everybody. The public-facing picture of ourselves, this big-toothed caricature of the truth, is just a house of cards that’s one outstretched palm away from collapsing at all moments. And whether we embrace it or deny it, there’s no escaping the fact that our every gesture and word is being imprinted onto the next generation, consciously or not. Your kids are always watching, folks! Even without superpowers, they know it all! So be afraid! Be very, very afraid.