Frédéric Hambalek on Paranormal Parent Trap ‘What Marielle Knows’

When German director Frédéric Hambalek first started writing What Marielle Knows, he had no children. By the time the film finally made it to screen, premiering in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, he had two. As it turned out, Parenthood would shape the film unexpectedly.

In the high-concept dark dramedy, Hambalek carries out a social experiment. The titular teenage girl (played by Laeni Geiseler, a revelation) receives telepathic powers after she’s smacked in the face by her best friend. Suddenly, Marielle has the power to see and hear what her mother, Julia (Julia Jentsch), and father, Tobias (Felix Kramer), are doing, whether they’re off at work, sneaking a smoke and flirting with office colleagues, or engaging in pillow talk in the bedroom with the door closed. Suddenly, under 24/7 observation, Tobias and Julia are forced to confront their hypocrisies and contradictions.

“The idea, before I had kids, came when someone showed me a baby phone, where you could watch their sleeping baby and it somehow felt wrong, that kind of invasion of privacy,” says Hambalek. “I started thinking about how privacy works inside a family. When I became a father myself I found it more interesting to switch the perspective to the parents, to put the audience in their shoes.”

How would you behave, the film asks, if you knew your children were watching you?

“When you’re raising children, you’re giving them this illusion of how they should behave: No sweets, don’t fight, share your toys, etc., but you come to realize you aren’t practicing what you preach,” he says. “Here we have the child as a moral authority that can stand over the parents, judging like a [all-seeing] god.”

And that god, as any parent of a teenager can attest, can be judging and unforgiving. Marielle views her mother’s (R-rated) flirting with a college as tantamount to adultery. Dad’s attempt to enforce his will at a marketing meeting — in order to impress the daughter he knows is watching — ends in disaster. As the family’s perfect family facade unravels, Hambalek balances the drama with absurd comedy, as when Julia decides to turn an office nooner into an opportunity for sex education.

“Like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie co-directed with M. Night Shyamalan,” was the verdict of Hollywood Reporter critic Jordan Mintzer.

“I tried to create situations that could be both funny and absurd, dramatic and tragic,” Hambalek says. “Interestingly, international audiences seem to find the film a lot funnier.”

Hambalek knew that the film would hinge on the casting of Marielle. “She’s just incredible,” he says of Geiseler. “She has an unbelievable presence, very clever, and an unbelievable actress who maintains a mystery.” He said her age — Marielle is 13 — was key. “It’s that point, on the edge of puberty, still with a bit of the innocence of a child, but where you could feel she could understand more adult things.”

With the focus clearly on Marielle’s parents — “at no time in the film does the viewer know more than the parents,” Hambalek notes — Marielle remains the enigma at the center of the film. We never really find out what Marielle thinks, much less what she knows. Again, parents of teenagers can relate.

The film’s cinematography reinforces its themes of voyeurism and moral scrutiny. Instead of using a subjective perspective to evoke Marielle’s supernatural power and making the movie a “Shining for dummies,” says Hambalek, he has his camera creep on his characters, “as if they were another person in the room, slowing moving forward, step by step.” The director even added the subtle sound of footsteps on the soundtrack to evoke the feeling of an entity approaching.

With its mix of high-concept storytelling and sharp social commentary, What Marielle Knows has major remake potential, though some of the potty-mouthed sex talk might not make the cut of the Disney version.

One of the surprise delights of this year’s Berlinale competition, Frédéric Hambalek’s second feature manages to provoke and delight in its look at the delicate balance between honesty and privacy within a family. He leaves it up to the audience to decide who, if anyone, is in the right.

“The film is not about whether the parents are good or bad,” he concludes. “It’s about what happens when there’s no place left to hide.”