Hi, Today Im going to
explain a Scottish mystery thriller film called
“Marionette”. Spoilers ahead! and wait for the massive plot twist in the end.
At the beginning of the film, we are
introduced to 10-years-old Manny.
He doesn’t like to talk to people and
often keeps to himself. The only thing
Manny is interested in is drawing. He likes
to draw dark obscure pictures of accidents
and events. His personality added with his
hobby makes people think he is a freak.
His mother often brings him to therapy to
help him overcome an unsaid past trauma.
Most therapists think the drawings are
just a way for Manny to relieve stress
but it couldn’t be further from the truth.
The scene cuts to an American woman named
Marianne Winter arriving in Scotland.
She is an experienced psychiatrist who
has come here to start a new life because of an
undisclosed tragedy that happened back home.
Although in a new place and around new people,
Marianne doesn’t seem to be hopeful or happy.
The first visit she makes is to her workplace
where she is welcomed by a co-worker named Maur.
The kind lady shows her the counseling room
she will be working in. Maur is confused as
to why Marianne chose to come to Scotland when
she had a much better job back in New York.
To cut the conversation short, Marianne
simply says that she likes the rain.
The facility is short staffed after their previous
psychiatrist was hospitalized for a mental
problem. Hence, Marianne only gets a few hours
before her first session with the patients.
She has two sessions that day but the second
one is far more interesting than the first.
The patient is Manny who likes to draw dark
obscure pictures of accidents and events.
Most of his drawings depict a pig in place of
humans which Marianne thinks is interesting.
She tries making small talk with Manny but he
is busy drawing for the half of the session. So,
she takes a different approach and starts
talking about the drawing. For the first time,
Manny speaks and claims that no one likes
when he talks so he prefers staying quiet.
Marionette 2020 Full Movie Watch Online
On being asked why people feel that way, he
replies that he can make things happen.
Intrigued, Marianne asks him what was the
last thing he made happen. To her surprise,
he replies, you. The comment doesn’t make
sense to the doctor but she fails to realize
that the kid isn’t just blabbering.
After work, Marianne goes to a bar for a
drink. She comes across a man who seems to
be interested in her but doesn’t approach
her. The man is with a girl who happens to be
Marianne’s new colleague. She hands Marianne a
brochure of a book club she and her guy friend
attend and invites her to join the club.
A while later, Marianne is on her way home
when she comes across a car crash under a
tunnel. The car is on fire and a man underneath
it is injured but not dead. Marianne wants to
help him but she freezes in shock and cannot
move at all. Eventually, it explodes and the
passersby can do nothing to save the guy.
The scene abruptly cuts to the next day.
Marianne finds a bunch of Manny’s drawings. One
of them depicts a car crash, similar to the one
she witnessed yesterday. Except, there is a pig
present on the scene. In the next therapy session,
she asks the kid if he saw the car
crash on the news and remembered it.
Manny says that he didn’t see
anything about the car crash, in fact,
he is the one who made it happen. He also adds
that he makes everything happen in this world
and if it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t be here.
A confused Marianne looks at him in awe when he
claims that there is a gun in her drawer.
She dismisses the comment as him trying to be
spooky and she doesn’t bother
to check the drawer either.
Later that day, the staff of the clinic
organize a monthly meeting to talk about
their patients. Marianne is told that
she is the only person Manny speaks to
and is otherwise always quiet. He refuses to talk
to his adoptive mother and his friends as well.
Manny was previously treated by a doctor whose
position Marianne took in the office. She wants
to study the case file from the former doctor and
the administration promises to look into it.
In the evening, Marianne goes to the book club she
was told about. As a group discussion takes place,
the handsome guy from the bar catches her
attention. After the discussion, she introduces
herself to him. The guy’s name is Kieran and
he lives in the same neighborhood as Marianne.
The two talk briefly before Marianne gives him a
ride to his home. Kieran takes a step forward and
invites her in but Marianne quickly declines.
At night, she dreams of the time she was in
America with her husband Josh. They were
an ideal and happy couple driving to a cafe
one day when their car broke down. They asked
for help from a man passing by in his vehicle.
Everything was going well until they drove
off the road and hit a tree. In the accident,
everyone died except for Marianne.
The recurring nightmare wakes Marianne and she
goes to the office again to work and get her mind
off the dream. To her surprise, she finds a gun in
the drawer that Manny was talking about yesterday.
Before she can comprehend what is going on,
she gets a call from a man asking her to kill
“him” before “he” kills her. The person cuts
the call abruptly leaving Marianne confused.
In the following scene, she meets Kieran and chats
with him. The guy owns a boat, so the two decide
to sail for fun. He asks her about the wedding
ring and finds out about her husband’s death.
Marianne also reveals that she came to Scotland
to run away from all the haunting memories
but so far it doesn’t seem to be working.
The next day at work, Marianne tells her boss
about the strange call she received yesterday. The
man assumes it must be from the former employee
of the clinic, McVittie. He was the psychiatrist
working on Manny’s case before being admitted
to a mental asylum for being delusional.
Since most of his reports on Manny were
affected by his mental health problems,
the director refuses to provide his final
notes. Still, he provides Marianne with all
the background information about the kid.
It turns out Manny’s father died in a car crash
and his mother committed the unthinkable
right after. He was found in his house,
severely malnourished and sick. Since
then, he has made great progress
and is now living with his adoptive mother.
Marianne looks at his drawings again and they
seem much more disturbing to her after
knowing what he has been through.
In the following session, Manny asks her if
the gun scared her. Marianne is shocked but she
pretends to not know what he is talking about.
This angers Manny and this time, he draws a
drowning man and writes the name Kieran underneath
it. Marianne is in utter shock because she and
Kieran had decided to go sailing later today.
Moreover, the kid was never told about Kieran.
After the season ends, Marianne finds out
that the former doctor McVittie developed
an obsession with Manny and used to spend a lot
of his time in the library. Out of curiosity,
she looks at the book he read and finds
a note inside it. It says that Manny’s
full name Emmanuel means “God is with us”.
Later, she visits Manny in his home and asks
him how he knew about Kieran. When the kid refuses
to reply, she loses her temper which gives the kid
a panic attack. Marianne notices a disturbing
drawing he has made and runs away quickly.
Then, she goes to meet Kieran for their trip but
he is nowhere to be found. Marianne is already
scared about his safety after the drawing of
a drowning man Manny showed her. She waits for
him in her car for an hour but he never shows
up. After that, she goes to the book club and
then to his apartment, both with no results.
Upon returning home, she watches the news that
says more than twenty-five hundred people
have died in the flood that occurred a few
hours ago. She freaks out and goes through
Manny’s drawings to find a picture of a flood
with the number twenty-five written on top.
The next day in the office, Marianne is determined
to find out more about Manny. She breaks into her
boss’s office and is seconds away from finding the
notes before her boss catches her red-handed. He
has also been informed about Marianne’s trip to
Manny’s house. He asks her to take a rest for a
few days and return to work with a fresh mind.
After that, Marianne goes to the mental asylum
to meet McVittie. He yet again asks her to kill
Manny before he kills her. Before Marianne
can question him further, he leaves.
Then, she notices that he was reading a book
titled Second death. It reminds her of one
of Manny’s drawings where he had depicted a man
falling off a building. She realizes something bad
is about to happen to McVittie and runs outside.
But before she can reach him, he falls off the
building, exactly like Manny had predicted.
This proves that Manny is not a normal boy which
means Kieran’s life is also in danger. Marianne
panics and goes to Kieran’s boat yet again.
She is scared that if Kieran gets on
his boat, he will drown and die. Hence,
she unmoors the boat away, hoping to keep him from
boarding it and hence preventing his death.
Then, she goes to the clinic and steals all
of Manny’s drawings from the archive. To her
surprise, everything that has happened to her in
the past has been vaguely depicted in the drawings
and she is represented as the pig in all of them.
One drawing in particular catches her attention
in which a man is asleep on a sinking boat.
Marianne realizes that it is Kieran who was
probably asleep on the boat that she
unmoored in heavy rainfall. She runs to
the site of the boat crash and finds Kieran’s
dead body being brought out of the waters.
She had been manipulated into making Manny’s
predictions come true. Marianne loses control
of herself and abducts Manny after the
incident. She points her gun at him,
asking him to reveal his true identity.
She thinks he is a messenger sent by god
to punish her because she is an atheist.
They stop at an on construction building where
Marianne points the gun at Manny and asks him
if she is still being controlled by him. Manny,
in turn, claims that she was the one who made
everything happen. She opened the drawer and
the gun appeared, and she was the one who killed
Kieran. Having had enough, Marianne shoots the kid
dead and commits the unthinkable right after.
In the following scene, she is in the hospital
after the car crash. When she wakes
up, her husband Josh is by her side.
It turns out he survived the crash and only she
was hurt. They return home normally, unaware of
everything that happened in Scotland.
But in the middle of the night,
Marianne wakes up and tells Josh she has been to
Scotland before. She thinks it was a dream but
remembers every detail of the visit vividly.
She calls the clinic the next day and hearing
her colleague’s voice makes it clear that the
dream was true. Without informing anyone, she
flies to Scotland the next morning and meets her
colleagues. However, they don’t recognize her.
She asks them about Manny but they do not know
him either. Determined to know where he is,
she goes to the archive room and finds his files
on the ground. All of a sudden, Manny appears from
the dark and startles her. He says that he
never changed the future or manipulated her,
it was her who made his predictions
real by looking at the drawings.
Marianne takes a chance and looks
at the files again and finds a gun
inside. She also finds a single drawing that
shows her Josh’s death which means she has
locked his death by looking at the picture.
She walks outside and screams in frustration
before the police arrive and take her to
a mental asylum. In the following scene,
Manny comes to visit her. Then, something
clicks on Marianne’s mind. She figures out that
Manny needs her to fulfill his predictions.
At the same time, Manny is also inside the closet
of his house. He is drawing yet another picture
in which he is visiting a pig in the hospital,
like how he was with Marianne earlier.
After that, we see Marianne in a therapy session.
She has finally found out the meaning of her
life and everything that has been happening
to her until now. She knows that she only
exists in Manny’s mind, which is why he
is able to change and manipulate her future.
Manny used to be a happy child when his parents
were alive. He had everything he wished for in
life. But after the horrible death of his parents,
he completely turned away from reality.
He felt like nothing in his life was
in his control so he started to draw.
It turns out that, he created a false reality
in his art that he had complete control over.
Marianne is also a part of this reality and is
not a real person. This is why Manny could make
her do anything and even send her in the past.
Marianne remembers him telling her that he created
her. At the time, she couldn’t figure out what
it meant, but now, it is crystal clear.
She looks up and says that everything in the
universe she is in, exists in the mind of a ten
year old boy. Back in actuality, Manny draws a
final picture of a pig telling the entire truth
to a therapist. He finally lets go of the false
reality he created in his mind and simultaneously,
the world around Marianne disappears.
In the end, we see Manny hug his adoptive mother,
accepting the reality of his parents’ death.
Here movie ends.
Thank You.
ALSO READ THIS : Moonfall (2022) Film Explained
