NZIFF 2025 Craccum Coverage | What Marielle Knows
Parenthood according to assholes: ego first, child second, love optional.
"Your parents don't love you." It's a thought that I find very alien, but also crushingly devastating if I ever have to find that out on my own. What Marielle Knows sets up the rules of the game: Marielle can read the minds of her parents, and her father and mother gradually lose their shit and demonstrate the lengths of psychological cruelty they're willing to inflict towards each other.
Who knew middle-class ennui and the contradicting social conventions of adolescent privacy and parental affection make for a darkly funny movie? But interestingly, this film focuses solely on the perspectives of Marielle's father and mother; I stress the distinction of 'father' and 'mother' and not as collective 'parents' throughout this review because Marielle's perspective is non-existent. In the most derogatory sense, this is a 'mature' movie made for adults, depicting other adults' incapacity to shed their ego and willingly make sacrifices for their loved ones. Marielle is rendered a narrative device, if not a metaphorical membrane, through which our father and mother pass between the domestic and professional spheres. Any sensibility towards exploring Marielle's young adolescent experience is wholly ignored. Instead, manipulation and Machiavellian sensibilities become the modus operandi of our father and mother, using each other's secrets as blackmail (secret trysts, workplace emasculation) to satiate their lack of agency and empathy in achieving the much-coveted ideal of the 'happy family'. Depictions of sad and pathetic human behaviour are a good barometer to gauge whether people see such behaviours as humorous or tragic, relatable or detestable, natural or absurd.
If the general cynicism of the film's gradual flaying of our patriarchs and matriarchs' narcissism, dishonesty and infidelity already establishes minimal sympathy for our characters, the cool, steely slowness of its Euro-arthouse pacing and realism enervates even further one's general patience with the formal motivations of its style. The comedy of manners starts to ring inauthentic, cyclical, and stationary amidst the myriad of moral quandaries telepathy can offer in the film's narrative trajectories. Yet, the scope of What Marielle Knows is narrow—maybe for the better—if not the pilot episode of a potentially lengthy television show based on its premise alone. The minimal character development of Marielle can either be intentional (film form mirroring our father and mother's egotism) or detrimental (stunted narrative catharsis and emotional proximity), depending on who you ask. I lean more towards the latter. Maybe I'm lucky I don't find our father and mother's behaviours familiar or relatable. Still, I will admit their forms of emotional warfare lend themselves very well to easy lampoonings and biting criticism (the contradictions of the casual, stone-faced white lies our parents tell to us about their day against the inclination to demand immediate truth and recourse from children without any reciprocation).
If you're in the mood for mean-spirited laughs, What Marielle Knows surely revels in its conniving and hypocritical characters' path to domestic disintegration. Comedy isn't a matter of timing; it's a matter of being.
What Marielle Knows | Trailer | NZIFF25
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