‘What Marielle Knew’ Review: What Would You Do If Your Daughter Could Suddenly Read Your Mind?

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It all starts with a slap. After getting into a fight at school, Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) spontaneously develops the capacity to eavesdrop on her parents’ lives.

Whether the teenage girl wants to or not, she can sense what her mom and dad are doing at every moment — an uncanny (and highly inconvenient) ability that disrupts the tidy sense of mutual respect her family had been maintaining until that point.

Come to find, most of the things Julia (Julia Jentsch) and Tobias (Felix Kramer) tell one another around the kitchen table aren’t true, a subtle yet essential observation revealed by “What Marielle Knew.” In nearly all families, it’s the adults who have the upper hand, monitoring how their children behave, while carefully filtering which details they choose to share.

But in writer-director Frédéric Hambalek’s intriguing thought experiment, that dynamic is reversed, and a young girl inexplicably gains the upper hand, serving as conscience, confessor and ultimately mirror to her parents’ true selves.