Marianne - Season One

MARIANNE
Season One
(2019)
Dir - Samuel Bodin
OVERALL: MEH

Arriving just in time to get a proper enough buzz going for it for the Fall/Halloween season, (the ideal period for most cinematic horror properties to get unleashed), Marianne is the latest foreign export to successfully and unabashedly cater to genre fanatics.  This is not a knock on the program right out of the gate by the way.  Yet it would be unmistakable to come to any conclusions that the creative parties involved were not going for the most balls-out horror tinged program they could possibly muster.  The genre is heavily seeped in the program's every pore.

Marianne is one of the eleven series that Netflix debuted this summer and the first French horror one to make a significant impression.  It was co-written and exclusively directed by Samuel Bodin, a television director who also happened to make the bizarre, short fan film Batman: Ashes to Ashes.  Ten years later, he has delivered an ambitious, original work that owes enough to dozens of other sources to stand on its own.  There are certainly things that do not come together in Marianne and its reliance on contemporary tropes is understandable from a commercial perspective, but a lot of the problems present are due to the nature of being a, (so far), single television season.

The way that such programs come into being is that a lone season is greenlit for x-amount of episodes and if all goes well, it will return for more.  Netflix generally has a "wrap-it up in three or four seasons, period" moto which is both good and bad.  It is good in the fact that by giving every property the potential to expand itself yet not take up a decade or so of everyone's time with a new batch of episodes every year, stories can be told much more compactly.  There is little worry about any series overstaying its welcome and prattling on with ultimately pointless episodes that do not further advance any overall arc.  There sure are lots of programs out there to choose from, more than ever in fact so it is a sufficient formula to get in, get out, and get on to the next whatever thing that you are going to watch because we all got shit to do.

I mean, these socks are not going to fold themselves amiright?

The negative aspect of this concept is that sometimes a show does not get picked up again and one batch of episodes is all that you are going to get.  So this presents the people making them with the hugely difficult task of trying to hook enough viewers to get those numbers up there to make more episodes while at the same time trying to make their world seem as vast and detailed as possible.  Marianne is a partial success in this respect.  It tells a point A to point B story in eight episodes and can essentially leave itself hanging where it leaves off, be it somewhat unfortunately.  Still, better to leave em wanting more right?  That said, it also throws in a whole lot of stuff that doesn't pay off in the allowed lifespan it has so far.  Worse yet, other plot points are downright bulldozed over, making room for its own frustrating problems.

Halfway through Marianne, we get a flashback episode that comes awfully close to crashing the entire series into a mountain.  Finally given an answer as to what set all of the unfortunate, spooky events in motion when most of the main characters were teenagers, it is insultingly stupid how Victoire Du Bois' lead character Emma Larsimon decides to become an unrelenting outcast and scumbag doing everything she can to make her parents, friends, and the entire town she lives in disown her just because a single priest who was already a giant asshole to her tells her she has no choice.  Also, the entire unearthing of the title character and how or why exactly she decides to emerge when she does after a few stupid teenagers perform the most generic seance they can is a bit flimsy.

There is a bigger issue in the fact that Marianne makes an all too common problem of giving their supernatural powerhouse completely arbitrary powers.  When the show kicks off, Marianne is currently possessing the mother of Emma's friend who led the initial seance when they were younger, but why now and why bother?  What does writing about her in Emma's books have to do with anything?  She speaks through Emma for a few seconds when originally summoned, but showed up in her dreams before and after that, as well as other peoples dreams.  She can also appear as the younger sister of her friend or pretty much anybody at any time as we later find out, as well as a stuffed animal or pretty much any object as we later find out.  Sometimes she needs to put people's teeth in human skin sacks to keep people from moving, (or something), sometimes her body is in a hole and sometimes it is in an open grave, sometimes a necklace temporarily stops her, sometimes she possesses people so successfully that they are powerless to regain control, sometimes she just casually possesses people, etc.  Basically, this Marianne broad has absolutely no problem doing whatever she wants to whoever she wants at any time unless the script wants to make it seem like she is not doing whatever she wants to whoever she wants for a specific amount of time.

I wonder if anyone in horror movies know that the Ouija board is actually trademarked by Hasbro.  So I guess this counts as product placement?

Now granted, some of this could be expanded upon if Marianne gets a chance to dig deeper into its mythology.  Yet it sure seems an awful, awful lot like the people who made the show simply wanted to put as much cool, horror movie shit in as they could because horror movies are cool and people like cool horror movie shit.  Again, this is because you better hook your audience quick or risk losing them and the network that gave the thumbs up for your series to begin with.  So essentially, the logical part of your brain that asks rather standard questions which the show has no proper opportunity to answer under the circumstances has to be turned off to fully embrace the experience.  Which falls into the very broad, general concept that the horror film, (or TV show), is in many ways broken as far as how the general public is conditioned and often forced to partake of it.

Is there potential to tell a captivating story with Marianne and have its horror movie cake as well?  Yes and no.  Despite eight episodes to play with, the format here does not particularly allow such a thing, at least not when you have to have all of those boo scares, freaky, bug-eyed monster faces, creepy music, muted color pallets, and more boo scares thrown into the mix.  You have to give the people what they want and what they want is the stuff that lets them know that they are watching a horror thing every single step of the way.  I applaud Bodin and his creative team here as well as the cast who are undoubtedly doing their absolute best and convincingly having a very fun time with the material.  You can certainly see where Marianne can excel more at, essentially meaning its story which is incredibly more interesting than the endless stream of visual and audio cliches it keeps pummeling you with.

Since ambiguity is not really allowed and that ship has already sailed, it would be nice to really flesh out the universe here and clean up some of the mess in future seasons.  Getting to the bottom of how Marianne can do the things that she does and why as opposed to just saying "because horror movies, who cares?", would be a very lovely endeavor to sign up for.  Time will have to tell though and if indeed everyone involved is just happy to go all creepy haunted house window dressing for subsequent seasons, it will definitely be enjoyable for many.  One could hold horror up to higher standards, perhaps impossible ones in this case, but it is still nice that people are trying and putting the content out there.  Marianne is by no means a failure and it would be great to enjoy it a lot more.  Maybe we should wait and see if we find out what in the goddamn hell all of those black, muck-covered, reaching hands in her grave in the last episode were all about.

If I had those many hands, I would never leave the house.  I would also probably want to clean them off first though.