What Marielle Knows: a teenager gains the ability to read her parents’ minds in this biting German comedy
What would you do if your child could listen in to your private conversations? Frédéric Hambalek’s dark but hilarious film about a teen with telepathic powers feels designed to make parents wince.
- Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival
Conceivably the most uproarious German comedy since Toni Erdmann (2016), this second feature from Baden-born writer-director Frédéric Hambalek puts a gentrified arthouse gloss on the kind of high-concept comic scenario that Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler would have been right at home in. It’s Liar Liar (1997) scored to Beethoven string quartets.
Hambalek’s debut, Model Olimpia (2020), was a severe, Haneke-like drama about a mother’s relationship with her antisocial, violence-obsessed son. What Marielle Knows continues this interest in the bond between parents and withdrawn, unfathomable kids, but moves into the realm of satire and fantasy, as teenage Marielle (newcomer Laeni Geiseler) – following a slap across the face from another girl at school – develops the telepathic ability to listen in on her parents’ private lives.
Its title acknowledges the influence of Henry James’s 1897 novel What Maisie Knew (made into a 2012 film by Scott McGehee and David Siegel), in which James uses the perspective of an only daughter to lay bare the negligence and self-interest of her divorced parents.
In Hambalek’s film, Marielle’s supernatural gift similarly exposes her to the hypocrisies of the adult world and the guilty secrets of her mum and dad. His opening scene is a graphic flirtation between mum Julia (Julia Jentsch) and a work colleague, while we first meet dad Tobias (Felix Kramer) at an editorial meeting at the publishing house where he works – he’s being undermined by a smarmy rival about the cover he’s proposing for a new novel; a headless bird design that his colleague dubs “pseudo-Magritte”.
Naturally, around the family dinner table with Marielle later that evening, these encounters go either unmentioned or are given a much more self-flattering spin. But Marielle’s new gift has made her an unwitting witness of these episodes, allowing her to discern the chasm between her parents’ accounts and what really happened.
The skill turns an already moody teenager into a deeply disillusioned one, as she can now see her mother’s infidelity and her father’s ineffectuality plain as day – and what’s more she’s helplessly tuned in to their private discussions as to what to do about it. Hambalek’s witty script is precision-tooled to induce parental wincing, not least when, refusing to believe that Marielle has really developed a form of ESP, her parents’ initial response is – pathetically – to take away her tablet.
But they can’t ignore her gift for long – she has perfect recall of conversations that happened behind closed doors – and the film orchestrates a succession of hilarious sequences as the married pair try to contain the situation and claw back some of their daughter’s respect. A comic highlight sees them alone in their bedroom but switching to speaking in French to evade Marielle’s comprehension, with Tobias then taunting his wife with the explicit come-ons from her office affair – all leaked to him via their daughter. Such moments make for exquisitely twisted theatre, while prodding and probing at moral and ethical questions about the boundaries of trust between a couple and with their kids.
The escalating comedy owes much to sympathetic performances from Jentsch and Kramer, playing two well-heeled professionals squirming under an unwelcome microscope. Marielle’s sudden omniscience is, of course, no match for the all-seeing eye of the camera itself, and for all the couple’s infelicities and wounded vanity, the gaze of What Marielle Knows is more sparing than that of James’s novel. Julia and Tobias are hypocrites, yes, but which of our own private lives and conversations could withstand similar scrutiny?
Meanwhile, the girl who knows too much remains herself unknowable. Supernaturally exposed to adult behaviour and language, as well as her parents’ pride, lust and other deadly sins besides, Marielle is granted a premature window onto grown-up experience and the shortcomings most of us have in navigating it. In enigmatic interludes in Hamalek’s film we see her shot from a low angle, gazing into the camera – in silent judgement, perhaps, but in any case engaged in the kind of impassive contemplation that’s impossible for anyone else to access.
Why she gets her gift, beyond the idea that it’s somehow knocked into her, is not a question that Hambalek answers. Instead he uses this Tales of the Unexpected-style device without any other fantasy trappings to arrive at a uniquely contemporary comedy of manners – one that pulls off an impressive balance of insight and playful provocation.