TV Review: Netflix's Marianne (2019)

It’s time for some Netflix horror with French series Marianne (2019). Needless to say, there will be SPOILERS. Oh, and if some of the names are misspelled (like Inspector Raunan’s in the review posted/tweeted while watching) it’s the subtitles’ fault (BTW if the new spelling is wrong, it’s imdb’s fault).

First, the plot: Emma is the famous author of a bestselling series of books following the fight between Lizzie Larck and evil dead witch Marianne. The stories were born from her terrifying nightmares, which stopped once she began writing. However, as soon as she decides to finish the series, Marianne begins to haunt her dreams again. But are they really just dreams? Caroline, a childhood friend of Emma’s doesn’t think so and tells her her mother, Mrs Daugeron, claims to be possessed by Marianne, which led her to torture her husband and daughter. Emma doesn’t believe her, but after Caroline tells her Marianne is going to attack her parents right before killing herself in front of her, Emma’s forced to return to her hometown, Elden. There, she finds other people from her past – Aurore, Sebastien, Arnaud… and Marianne! The first episode is pretty promising but unfortunately, the show doesn’t fulfill that promise.

When Marianne is doing straight up horror, it’s great. Possessed Daugeron is creepy and scary, making curse baggies with her own teeth and fingernails wrapped in pieces of skin she flayed off her imprisoned husband. Marianne’s backstory is pretty juicy – having brought doom to everyone around her since childhood and finally killing her children and husband before marrying a demon, Beleth, the King of Cats, who commands 85 legions of Hell. That didn’t prevent her from being put on trial for witchcraft and executed, vowing revenge on her killers and their descendants. She can’t lie about her name, which comes in handy when you suspect she’s possessing people and is well used by the show. She also has her own nursery rhyme and an ominous catchphrase: I never leave empty-handed. There’s no twist revealing her as an innocent woman who was wrongfully prosecuted – she’s unrepentantly evil and no one is safe from her cruelty. The lore uncovered by Samuel while investigating Marianne’s origins sounds interesting – a demon seal and a forbidden, nameless language. There are some great spooky sequences and scenes, like the children going to the lighthouse to hang themselves, Emma’s nightmares, Daugeron’s locked door, Samuel finding Emma’s father, and several others. Emma’s complicated relationship with her mother provides some depth and tragedy. The show is good at creating a sense of urgency with the constant demands that Emma write again as first her parents and then Sebastien’s baby are taken by the witch. The stakes are high and the choices are impossible, especially after Emma realizes that what she writes happens in real life. So, write and save her parents and Sebastien’s baby, while dooming a stranger somewhere to killing their own child or dying a horrible death? Or not write and see the people closest to her suffer? All of this is great, however the show undermines itself with some questionable choices.

In between the horror and sometimes in the middle of it, there’s some humour with what we’re guessing were supposed to be some charming, lighter moments – they’re not. So, we get Emma testing Sebastien’s marriage to Sophie because he told her he loved her 15 years ago when she was sent away by her parents. Not even the fact that Sophie’s pregnant stops her from acting like a complete jerk. If this had happened right after she arrived in town, it would still have been ridiculous considering everything that was already going on – happening after her parents disappearance and confrontation with a possessed Daugeron was simply unbelievable. Emma’s antics around Sebastien remain annoyingly juvenile throughout. At one point, Sebastien turns up in Emma’s bedroom, they flirt, and he offers to sleep with her just once, which she happily accepts. Our eyes rolled so hard they nearly fell out of our eye sockets, and we were relieved to find out that it had been an illusion, though that was very bad news for Emma. Seriously, that would’ve been just too much. Emma is more compelling and a better character when she’s either scared or defiant, which really should be the dominant moods in a situation like this. Her relative passivity when it comes to investigating her tormentor is disappointing, though, as Samuel is the one who gets to find old symbols and break into the church. As if one thirtysomething (at least we think they were all around 30) acting like a stupid teenager wasn’t enough, there’s also Aurore, whose younger self appeared to have been much more confident, and her unrequited love for Arnaud, who was Emma’s high school boyfriend. Naturally, Emma teases her about it and tries to push them together… right before a ritual to vanquish Marianne because that’s clearly what should be on their minds at the time. This leads to a very awkward conversation between Aurore and Arnaud that belongs in another show and didn’t succeed in making his fate any more affecting. Other odd humour placements include a letter of intent written by Xavier, the local priest, when he was a kid pondering to join the clergy. Yes, the final episode when it looks like Emma is about to lose her struggle with Marianne is the perfect time to include a child voiceover talking about punching the Devil on the face. This could also be considered what we saw as attempts at looking cool, which mixes some more comedic acting with a rock soundtrack. Look, we don’t know how to explain it, but you’ll know it when you see it. At one point, Emma tells Samuel, who’s a fan of her books, to stop reading books for teenage girls, which would make the Lizzie Larck series YA, and that’s what the show feels like sometimes – Young Adult horror. Though the bits we get from Emma’s books do seem fun.

Apart from that, there are some (more) inconsistencies. Given everything that he knew and how long he’d known it, why the hell did Xavier wait until the very end to do something? Why didn’t he tell Emma what Marianne was doing to her and what she wanted? Samuel steals the Molitor report right in front of him and he doesn’t try to reach out and compare notes? Of course, if he had, the show would’ve ended sooner. Caroline’s situation raises some questions. How did her friends not notice something was going on? The way they spoke to Emma it seemed that they hadn’t realized her mother was acting weird, either, even though she wasn’t exactly hiding it. Marianne’s connection to Emma was underwhelming – her house was near her grave and the dead witch reached out to her. Now, that could’ve been the starting point to some Faustian deal, but Marianne offered nothing apart from the opportunity of helping her in the future. This means the nightmares that made Emma a bed-wetter into her teens make little sense. If Marianne needs Emma’s cooperation, why is she giving her such good reasons to try to get rid of her? Yes, she’s evil, but that’s still pretty dumb. Of course, much like with Xavier withholding information, if Marianne had been sneakier, there’d be no show. Having everyone just give up on the ritual because nothing immediately happened when the exact same thing had happened on the original summoning 15 years ago after everything they had seen until then was insane and very hard to believe. That forbidden, nameless language we mentioned earlier ends up going nowhere, abandoned in favour of the typical Call the Entity by Its Real Name, which in this case is… Marianne Basselin. So, basically, her full, non witchy non demonic name. Was there hope for a second season? Despite the hype around Emma and her old friends, The Shipwreck Kids, the character connections don’t feel as deep as they should. It doesn’t help that Emma spends most of the first half of the show with her parents, especially her mother, and Camille. That Samuel takes over the investigation into the origins of Marianne felt like a missed opportunity. Why not let Emma and her friends do some detective work together (sans juvenile antics)? Considering Caroline was interested in the occult when young, she could’ve left some useful information hidden somewhere that could’ve led them to Pat and his esoteric shop. This way we would’ve seen their deep bond and maybe Arnaud and Tonio’s deaths would’ve meant more. As it was, they felt like the obvious, easy choices of the group.

VERDICT

The horror of Marianne (2019) is great. Unfortunately, that’s not all there is. It also features thinly sketched, occasionally annoying characters, inconsistencies, and misplaced humour. We like horror comedy, but this wasn’t it, as both elements never really gelled and the comedy often broke the flow of the horror. Maybe people complained about the open ending, as people are wont to do, but we thought it was fine, and even expected after Emma’s book reading in the first episode (in which she read the final chapter thus spoiling her own book for her fans because she’s a jerk). Yes, there may be more story to tell, but we, at least, don’t really need to see it. With only 8 episodes, some of which under 40 minutes, it’s probably best binged, as there’ll be less time to think about what’s going on.