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Marianne has to do her work and is given cases to handle. One case catches her interest Manny (who is played by a rather creepy Elijah Wolf) is also an orphan as he lost both his parents. He draws ferociously. Dark, highly energetic sketches seem to flow from him. When Marianne asks where the last few months of his notes are, her team looks at one another nervously. From her predecessor, we learn, is that he has been sectioned.
Now that Manny refuses to talk, all Marianne can do is examine his drawings closely. They depict devastation; dreadful calamities. While driving back home, Marianne is horrified by a car wreck. The next day, she discovers that in a bunch of Manny’s drawings, he has chillingly recreated the wrecked cars. Slowly, she pieces together a theory that Manny is not simply a child sketching his fantasies, but a soothsayer.
What does any of this mean? That is the primary question the story raises and struggles to answer. Moving from one way of thinking to another, Western to Eastern, religion to superstition, ‘two realities’ simply does not work for Repression. There is no metaphysical watershed because the film, conceptually, doubles back in on itself in its third act. Repression could have profited from a lightness of touch and otherworldliness that serves as a slow build rather than a sudden burst. Something is frightening about how Marianne’s connection with Manny poses danger for everyone near. The heaviness of the issues presented feels far too melodramatic to have any real impact.
It is exceptional because the film contains a lot of talent. The Scottish psychiatry ensemble contains well-known British performers Bill Paterson, Rebecca Front, and Peter Mullan. Elijah Wolf, who plays Manny, tries to make the best of a tough situation. The issue is, virtually nobody is fully developed: even Marianne remains a complete mystery. Repression fails to set up a baseline for the audience, so we never get to see her shocking obsession. The team of psychiatrists we need tends to keep it tightly bound to the view of academia two decades too late. As with most things in life, paying attention to detail makes Repression much more emotionally impactful.
Repression does not achieve what it sets out to do. In relation to the themes, the film is way too overloaded resulting in an unresolved narrative that is both incomplete and unsatisfactory. This is not “artistic ambiguity” this is the consequence of having an unreasonable number of “loose ends” and not having a reasonable conclusion. Repression contains all the elements of a psychological thriller and yet it fails to align all the pieces, meaning that it never hits the target.
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