Essentially acting as a feature-length riff on The Twilight Zone’s “It’s a Good Life,’ co-writer/director Elbert van Strien’s “Marionette” — which takes its title quite literally — is a moody Scotland-based thriller concerning a young boy who claims that he can control individuals thoughts and actions. Featuring a confident performance from newcomer Elijah Wolf, “Marionette” is a bit less than the sum of its individual parts. Still, for the first half of its runtime, the film is sufficiently compelling.
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After a confounding prologue featuring Peter Mullen’s Dr. McVittie self-immolating himself, the narrative settles into following around Dr. Marianne Winter (Thekla Reuten), a psychiatrist who has traveled to Scotland from America to escape the lingering trauma of a car accident that killed her husband (Sam Hazeldine). Taking over McVittie’s clients – who have mysteriously disappeared after becoming obsessed with a client — Winter takes a particular fascination with a young boy, Manny (Elijah Wolf). A quiet boy who likes the draw, Manny claims that he can control Winter’s actions — predicting a series of events in her life. Already on edge, once Manny’s predictions, and drawings, start to come true, Winter is forced to question if she has any free will or is, instead, a puppet of this little boy with god-like powers.
Interweaving Winter’s backstory — with myriad flashbacks to her time with her husband — van Strien does well to showcase the psychiatrist’s unraveling. But, the script also over-relies on sporadic voice-over to underline, and then highlight, the film’s themes. When Winter arrives at the airport, she blandly asks herself, “What am I doing here.” When trying to re-assert her own autonomy, she repeats the mantra “I’m in control” while performing tasks. Further, she also joins a book group that meets in the basement of a pub. There, the group argues about everything from self-fulfilling prophecies to Schrödinger’s cat in case we didn’t understand the (sub)text about the nature of free will.
Visually, van Strien washes out the palette when in Scotland, favoring overcast skies and dark greens and blues — another obvious metaphor for Winter’s interior mindset. Things brighten up once she starts a relationship with fellow book-clubber Kieran (Emun Elliot), but their relationship often just exists as an excuse to put someone in peril — an echo of how her husband died.
Reuten works well within the confines of her character, realistically portraying Winter’s spiral as she becomes more and more convinced that Manny is controlling her. Mullen, given minimal screen time, is as dour as ever, a perfect pitch for the actor as his character essentially acts as a warning for Winter about Manny. In perhaps the most complex role, Wolf is asked to play shades of psychopath within a quiet boy who’s obviously dealing with some unresolved issues surrounding his parents’ deaths. Burdened with a script and dialogue, that is the very definition of on-the-nose, the actors nevertheless create realized characters.
Further, “Marionette” may be eye-rollingly obvious in its themes, but for a decent amount of the runtime, it’s also a gothic thriller that plays up the atmospherics of Scotland. Yet by the time that the ending comes— a series of contrivances that initially flirts with the radical before pulling back the curtain to reveal a much more mundane conclusion – “Marionette” has, unfortunately, lost the thread.
Instead, we are given a series of reversals and rewinds that pile on a few two many twists as Winter falls down a rabbit hole of metaphysical questions about the nature of reality — think Steven Knight’s “Serenity” but less batshit crazy. If only “Marionette” embraced the sheer nuttiness of its conceit — especially towards the end. Instead, we are left with a very self-serious thriller that never quite comes together. [C-]