90 min | PG | June 24, 2022 | A24
A one-inch shell with one eye and a pair of shoes lives alone in an Airbnb with his grandmother. A filmmaker starts recording him and the videos go viral. The premise sounds like a gag, and then it quietly breaks your heart.
Marcel is a one-inch shell with a single googly eye and a pair of pink shoes. He lives in an Airbnb with his grandmother Connie and a documentary filmmaker named Dean who starts pointing a camera at him. The short videos that result make Marcel a viral sensation. Dean Fleischer Camp builds a feature around a question that has nothing to do with internet fame. The film is about loss, the family Marcel used to have, and the loneliness of being small in a house built for people who left.
Jenny Slate voices Marcel with a high reedy earnestness that never tips into cute. She delivers the character’s homemade philosophy as plain observation, and the comedy comes from how seriously Marcel takes his own logistics. Isabella Rossellini voices the grandmother Connie with a warmth that carries the film’s weight. She plays a shell who is fading and knows it, and her scenes tending the garden give the story its stakes. Dean Fleischer Camp plays himself as the off-screen interviewer, a quiet presence whose questions shape Marcel without crowding him.
Camp directs and co-writes with Slate and Nick Paley, and the central craft decision is to keep the camera handheld and human-scaled. The conceit holds because the documentary frame stays consistent. Dean shoots Marcel the way a person actually shoots a phone video, with the focus hunting and the angles slightly wrong. The stop-motion animation hides inside live-action footage so completely that Marcel reads as a real object in a real room. A late sequence built around a television interview lets the film turn the gaze of the internet into something Marcel has to survive rather than enjoy.
This is a film that takes a viral joke and refuses to coast on it. Marcel’s smallness is the whole point. He is a creature who has lost his community and built a life out of resourcefulness and grief. Camp and Slate find the sadness underneath the gimmick and trust the audience to sit with it. The result is a mockumentary that earns its tears by never reaching for them.