Welcome to Marwen review: Underlines Robert Zemeckis’ credentials as a relentlessly adventurous director

This is an arresting and original film about a hate crime that plays out like an escapist fantasy adventure

Dir: Robert Zemeckis; Starring: Steve Carell, Diane Kruger, Eiza González, Leslie Mann,Siobhan Williams, Gwendoline Christie. Cert 12A, 115 mins.

Robert Zemeckis is as close as present-day Hollywood comes to its own Georges Méliès-like figure. The Forrest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit director operates in the mainstream but his movies are characterised by their eye-popping special effects and their very offbeat storylines. His work divides opinion although it is a fair bet that in hindsight he will be looked on as one of the visionary filmmakers of his era.

Welcome to Marwen is eccentric, even by his standards. Scripted by Caroline Thompson (whose other credits include Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas), it tells the true story of Mark Hogancamp, victim of a brutal hate crime, but it plays more like The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb than a conventional biopic.

Hogancamp (played by Steve Carell) is first seen in the form of an Action Man-style, American GI figurine, flying a plane above Belgium during the Second World War. He crash lands in the mud and is apprehended by German officers. When he resists (“sorry, I don’t speak Nazi!”), they beat him up but he’s rescued by some buxom, gun-toting female resistance fighters who look as if they’ve stumbled out of a nearby Russ Meyer sexploitation movie. These beautiful dolls are the women of Marwen, a little village.

In “real “life, we discover, Hogancamp is a very damaged soul. A few years before, he was assaulted outside a bar. “They kicked every memory I ever had out of my head.” Once a very talented artist, he is no longer able to draw. Instead, he spends as much of his time as he can creating his own make-believe world of Marwen and then taking elaborate photos of the dolls. Like a little boy with a dog on the lead, he drags these dolls on a jeep behind him almost everywhere he goes.

Carell plays Hogancamp as innocent with a hint of both Forrest Gump and Peter Sellers’s Chance the Gardener about him. He is sweet-natured and naive. He is also a foot fetishist who owns 287 pairs of ladies’ shoes and who talks in slightly creepy fashion about women’s “essence”. He loves stilettos and incorporates them in his wartime fantasies even though (he claims) they weren’t invented until the 1950s.

The stories that he enacts with the dolls in Marwen are dark and often sexualised. They tend to involve him being beaten up and tortured by sadistic German officers, similar to the rednecks who assaulted him in real life. At the last minute, he will be rescued by the Amazonian-like resistance fighters. These dolls are all based on women he has encountered in his everyday life and who have treated him with kindness.

Hogancamp is on medication. His Russian caretaker Anna (Gwendoline Christie) tries to ration his intake but he is popping vast amounts of pills and they induce hallucinations involving the green tinted villain, Deja Thoris (Diane Kruger).

Welcome to Marwen has layers of bleakness and irony which you simply don’t expect in a big Hollywood studio movie. This gives the film its richness but may undermine its box office prospects. Like the great Cambodian director Rithy Panh in The Missing Picture (2013), his “documentary” about his family’s horrific experiences during the time of the Khmer Rouge, Zemeckis is using dolls to confront traumatic events.

Audiences expecting a straightforward comedy are likely to be wrong-footed by some of the turns that the film takes. Hogancamp’s fantasies are often violent. They invariably end up with the rugged officer doll or the women fighters blasting away at the Nazis with machine guns. These Nazis, though, always come back to life.

Hogancamp is deeply upset by his lawyer’s request that he should make a victim’s statement at the hearing at which his attackers’ sentencing will be determined. He has also become obsessed by his neighbour, Nicol (Leslie Mann). He has a big crush on her and quickly includes her among the other dolls in the make-believe, miniature world of Marwen.

The scenes between Carell and Mann have considerable charm. Her character is a tea-drinker with her own foibles. She has just left an abusive relationship. Zemeckis plays up the whimsical side of their friendship but, even here, there is misunderstanding and embarrassment when it comes to romance and sex. It wouldn’t take very much tweaking to turn Marwen into a horror film and to make Hogancamp seem very sinister. He is a voyeur with a Nazi obsession. Instead, the film portrays him as a very lovable outsider.

Zemeckis works his customary magic on the scenes with the dolls. Somehow, these plastic models are given expressions and emotions. They’re made to look very like the human beings on which they are based.

Marwen isn’t some idyllic never-never land into which Hogancamp can escape when the “real” world becomes too oppressive. It’s a place in which the tensions and fears of his everyday life are dramatised and exaggerated. The difference is that in the fictional village, he is a dashing alpha male type, not the dithering, neurotic figure who is terrified about turning up at his own court case.

Inspired by the award-winning 2010 documentary Marwencol, Welcome To Marwen is an arresting and very original affair – a mainstream film about a hate crime that unfolds like an escapist fantasy adventure. It is as odd as its own central character. The blurring of genre lines and the combination of comic and gothic elements, live action and animation, will challenge audiences accustomed to more straightforward storytelling.

Nonetheless, the film underlines Zemeckis’ credentials as a relentlessly adventurous and experimental director, ready to tackle material that his more cautious contemporaries would shun.

Welcome to Marwen is released in UK cinemas on 1 January