There's a specific kind of European thriller — candlelit, multilingual, stuffed with secret orders and ancient manuscripts — that mistakes density for depth. Manipulation, directed by David Balda, lands squarely in this tradition and mostly drowns in it. The setup is promising enough: young novice Matteo joins a tentacular Prague-based secret society run by the iron-fisted Master, blackmailing powerful figures and hoarding knowledge. The trouble is that every scene feels like a summary of a scene from a better film. The plot architecture is Da Vinci Code by way of a napkin sketch. Matteo is dispatched to infiltrate the Catholic church — why, exactly, remains frustratingly opaque. In Bologna, he encounters a circumspect Professor who delivers exposition about centuries of cabal corruption while the film hopes you've stopped asking questions about what any of it actually means. The Master is apparently hunting the alchemical secrets of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, which he pursues via vials of mystery liquid he swigs like a man raiding a hotel minibar. The ensemble is a pan-European assembly of performers — Predrag Bjelac, Pavel Kriz, Féodor Atkine, Heino Ferch — all delivering English dialogue that sits wrong in their mouths. This isn't a casting complaint; it's a structural one. When your characters sound like they're reading subtitles of themselves, every emotional beat lands at one remove. Matteo's crisis of conscience, triggered when his cultist father threatens to torture a defector's children, should land hard. It doesn't. The dialogue is the film's most consistent saboteur. 'The clouds seem to be gathering — and not just outside!' is a real line that a real person wrote and a real actor delivered, and it stands in for a broader tendency to have characters trespass, as the Guardian puts it, on their own narration. Everyone speaks like they're aware they're in a thriller and are doing their best to make that clear to anyone who might have missed it. To Balda's credit, the film looks genuinely good. He shoots with a brooding intelligence that the script doesn't deserve — candlelit interiors, weight-bearing shadow, a visual grammar that suggests a more serious film lying underneath this one. And the accumulated weight of twists in the back half generates some real forward momentum. You may find yourself mildly invested in the endgame despite yourself. But as all-powerful secret societies go, this is — as the Guardian's review notes — more Eyes Sewn Shut than Eyes Wide Shut: the trappings of transgression without any actual menace underneath.
