Marianne (2019) Reviewed as a French-Language Learning Tool

I love horror movies so when I saw Marianne on Netflix I decided to give it a go just by virtue of the fact that it was in French. The first season of Marianne is only eight episodes long, so it doesn't require too much commitment or attention span. Each episode is about 40-50min as well. It's set in France so the accents are French. Unfortunately I don't know enough French to know if the accent was different from a standard French accent. In any case, I watched it with French subtitles.

Summary

Marianne is about Emma Larsimon, a well-established horror author who has decided to retire her long-standing book series. During her promotions for the final book, a childhood friend shows up and convinces her to return to her hometown, as she believes that Marianne, the villain of Emma's book series has come to life and possessed her mother.

Review

I don't watch much French horror because the recommendations I've received in the genre feature body horror, gore and extreme psychological situations heavily. While Marianne has hints of the French style of horror, it is much milder and less explicit than others I've been recommended. It builds most of its suspense by playing on the feeling of being haunted, like when you're a kid and you get scared of walking down a hallway when the lights are off on the other side. I couldn't help but compare it to Haunting of Hill House as both tried to revive that unreasonable fear of something being there in the dark from everyone's childhoods. The series is worth a watch especially as Halloween is coming up.

It was surprisingly easy to understand with the subtitles on. It didn't have that much slang or figurative language. I could easily look up the phrases I didn't know using Google Translate. There were a few words that I couldn't find the meaning of, but they weren't vital to the story. I only needed to replay the scenes or switch to English subtitles during the scenes where they were reading excerpts of Emma's novels. While watching the show, I could also tell when what they were saying was not transcribed exactly into the subtitles. However I don't believe I could have watched the show without the subtitles. The actors spoke too quickly for me and there was a lot of vocabulary that I only understood knowing how it was spelt.

I'd recommend watching the show with subtitles on for intermediate French learners, and without for advanced ones.