Marion's Lillies
2025 · 38m
Directed by Marcello Mantero
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
After his wife Marion is murdered, the grieving David abandons the police's slow investigation and pursues the elusive killer himself, descending into a psychosis-laden obsession that blurs justice and vengeance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a grief-vengeance descent we've seen before—the wronged man unraveling into his own worst self—and Mantero doesn't seem interested in subverting that, just executing it competently. The psychosis blur is the promise, but the film plays it straight enough that I kept waiting for the heretical twist that never came.
Mantero demonstrates real formal control here: the 38-minute constraint forces a tightness that mirrors David's psychological compression, and the melancholic tone sustains a discipline that recalls the psychological thrillers of the '70s without pastiche. There's a lineage this film understands—the slow corruption of the protagonist as formal study—and it commits to that tradition with rigor.
The singular choice is the restraint in how Mantero visualizes the obsession—no frenetic montages or stylistic rupture, just the way the frame tightens around David's face across scenes, a subtle compression that costs nothing but creates everything. That decision to *not* explode formally while the character implodes is what makes this work on a tight budget.
Reviews
Bishop has the most screentime and he largely does it justice. Early on the catatonic grief is already laced with the harsh strains of nascent rage. With time it ferments and festers until—even though the viewer only knows him since the violent end of his old life—David becomes just about unrecognisable, and frighteningly so.