Marionette: A Troubled Shrink and A Creepy Child In Wood-Paneled Scottish Thriller

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

In Marionette, a psychological thriller from Dutch director Elbert van Strien, a recently widowed psychiatrist in her early 40s, Marianne Winters (Thekla Reuten) transfers from rural New York state to take a job in a neo-Gothic clinic in the Scottish port city of Aberdeen. She soon finds herself entangled in the case of a traumatized 10-year-old patient who believes he is directing the future with his violent drawings.

After a setup scene, where we see a middle-aged man (Peter Mullan) climb to a parapet, pour gasoline over himself and set himself on fire, we know there’s some scary back-story here. Also, you don’t cast Peter Mullan just to have him reduced to ashes in the first scene.

Amidst familiar tropes (troubled shrink, uncanny child, nightmare drawings) Marionette is notable for its high-concept script, co-written by van Strien and Ben Hopkins, which is replete with discussions about the quantum physics, the multiverse, God’s intentions and free will.

Most of these discussions take place in rooms swathed in gloomy wood panelling, occasionally relieved by scenes in rainy exteriors and dark granite buildings and flashbacks to Marianne’s happier life in sunny upstate New York before the traffic accident that killed her husband.

Initially, Marianne has a breakthrough with the boy patient, Manny (Elijah Wolf) an orphan with wide blue eyes and angelic golden curls, who, after along period of being mute, begins to talk. “No one likes what I say,” he says, “because of what I can do.”

Manny, who can include megalomania among his symptoms, takes credit for is summoning Dr. Winter to Scotland to become his therapist: “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here.”

Winter soon begins her own psychological descent, drinking heavily at night, experiencing detailed flashbacks of the events leading to her husband’s death. She progresses down a library investigation the history of Manny’s previous therapist, Dr. McVittie (Mullan). Cue a long stretch of library research, always a good way to move a movie slowly forward.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Reuten (Red Sparrow) is at her most interesting during her naturalistic encounters with co-workers and strangers, where she projects a kind of polite prickly reserve. But she’s less convincing character is pushed to more extreme anguished hysteria by Manny’s head games.

Marianne finds some solace in a budding relationship with a scruffily charming bookstore owner (Emun Elliott) and joins his book club. Here, the members discuss the puzzling nature of God and reality in more wood-paneled rooms over pints and drams, and Marianne declares that traditional religion implies “we’re marionettes in some sadist’s fantasy.”

Her outburst, which provides the film with a title punning on her name, is a setup for the last half-hour’s “twist” ending, which will already be guessed by those familiar with the famous Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life” or the celebrated 1953 Jerome Bixby short story of the same title from which it is adapted.

As a study in mutual traumatic grief between doctor and patient, Marionette has some resonance, but the emotional core of the story is smothered by its irritating intellectual pretensions and altogether too much wood paneling.

Marionette. Directed by Elbert van Strien. Written by Elbert van Strien and Ben Hopkins. Starring Thekla Reuten, Elijah Wolf, Emun Elliott and Peter Mullan. Available digitally and video on demand from January 21.