Marioneta
2013 · 18m · España
Directed by Cristian R. Sánchez
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
Ana, grieving her mother's death and clinging to pills in her parents' old house, begins to experience paranormal events centred on her mother's old puppet, a relic that seems to carry a message.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Marioneta plays it frustratingly straight—grief + puppet + paranoia is the kind of premise everyone nods along to, and Sánchez doesn't seem interested in breaking the fourth wall or genuinely unsettling the form, just executing a competent haunted-object film.
There's a disciplined restraint here in how the surrealism bleeds into the domestic space, and the puppet itself becomes a formally efficient symbol of maternal absence—the film knows its lineage (Spanish gothic, arthouse horror) and doesn't overstate its hand.
The entire film hinges on the decision to keep the puppet's agency ambiguous through editing and sound design rather than reveal—that sustained uncertainty transforms what could've been generic grief-horror into something genuinely unsettling, and it's never explained.