Kritiken

It models how a film can get close to its subject through simple but eloquent choices around camera, lighting, and editing, angles from which documentaries are too rarely reviewed by content-focused critics and audiences, and options that sometimes fly out the window when big studios subsidize the possibility of more grandiose approaches.

Marwencol, by Jeff Malmberg is a striking, unusual documentary about Mark Hogancamp, the victim of a brutal attack who recovers by using dolls and action figures to create a fantasy World War II version of his life. Hogancamp's world is a highly immersive work of art, fashioned after the mythology of World War II as found in countless war movies.

It's all inherently fascinating, and Malmberg neither gawks nor builds up a condescending outsider-artist mythology around his subject, making Marwencol not just a curio-doc with an above-average hook, but an insightful perspective on the uses and limits of fantasy.

Marwencol doesn't try to sell or dazzle with an exhibitionism that keeps us at a distance... Jeff Malmberg made this film distinctive through an odd intersection of two fields that often combat each other – directing and editing. The editor is the first real audience member to see a film, and he has to pull it from the realm of the abstract into something that makes a viewer respond.