In a film billed as a grim fairy tale, the story follows Malcolm Shanks [Marcel Marceau], a deaf yet razor-sharp lip reader and mute puppeteer who lives with his cruel sister Tsilla Chelton and her alcoholic husband, Mr. Barton [Philippe Clay]. His formidable talent catches the eye of the enigmatic doctor-mentor, Mr. Walker [Marcel Marceau], who hires him as a lab assistant at a sprawling Gothic mansion. Malcolm’s family press him to be the breadwinner, resenting when he hides away a portion of his pay. The experiments in Walker’s mansion revolve around reanimating the dead and bending their bodies to control them like marionettes, starting with a frog and a chicken. The premise sets a dark, fantastical mood* as Malcolm’s puppets begin to reflect his inner world.
When Mr. Walker dies unexpectedly, Malcolm returns home clutching a puppet of his employer—an object of personal significance—and begins crafting a puppet show for his teenage assistant Celia Cindy Eilbacher on her birthday. His sister and brother-in-law grow more outraged by his absence from work, and Barton smashes the Walker puppet’s head, insisting Malcolm resume his duties. He complies by applying the experimental reanimation to Walker himself, restoring life in a way that blurs the line between art and horrid reality.
A chain of eerie events unfolds. Walker’s death is followed by Malcolm’s chilling act of animating Barton, who staggers through the streets in a puppet-like parade of movement that looks almost like drunkenness. Mrs. Barton, in a cruel twist of fate, is killed when a car strikes the family as they move through the town. A police officer Read Morgan arrives to sort out the chaos, but Malcolm somehow fends off suspicion by staging a scene in which he appears to be an ordinary spectator, the flashlight from the officer’s beam glancing past the family as if they were simply living figures under a show’s glow.
The next day, Malcolm takes the Bartons to the grocery store, where grocer William Castle allows them to take what they need, even paying off more than what is owed while Barton fills a wicker basket with gin. Celia’s mother consents to a picnic, and Celia becomes increasingly unsettled as she discovers the Bartons’ true fate, though Malcolm gestures that their death was caused by a car accident. He then leads Celia to Walker’s mansion to celebrate her birthday, where she admires a portrait of Walker’s late wife (unseen) and slips into one of her dresses. Malcolm, who dons 19th-century attire while keeping his bell-bottoms, shares a formal dinner with Celia, with the Bartons acting as servants. The scene turns darker when Mrs. Barton cuts off a finger while slicing the cake, a moment Malcolm discreetly hides in his lapel.
Outside, trouble intensifies as a motorcycle gang arrives. Their leader, Beethoven [Phil Adams], crashes off the road and dies, and his companions haul him into the mansion, scattering cake and shattered expectations. The gang members attack Malcolm and Celia. Goliath [Biff Manard] assaults Celia, and Mata Hari [Helena Kallianiotes] tries to intervene, only to be knocked aside and left to sober up on Barton’s gin. Einstein [Don Calfa] becomes fascinated with Walker’s experiments, pushing the Bartons to perform more humiliating tricks than Malcolm would have imagined. By night’s end, Celia is found dead in the yard, and Malcolm reanimates Walker from the grave to confront the gang after they discard Barton’s controls into a well. The gang rebels in horror and escapes.
In a sepia-lit sequence, Malcolm briefly reanimates Celia for a dance, and the film returns to the opening frame with extreme close-ups of Malcolm’s eye. Each puppet receives a curtain call as the story circles back to its origin, finishing with a final line from William Makepeace Thackeray:
> Come... let us shut up the box and the puppets—for our play is played out.
As the film draws to a close, a haunting twist emerges: the entire revenge fantasy—the puppet theater and the town’s chaos—unfolds within Malcolm’s mind as he performs his puppet show, a paranoid reverie that binds art, mortality, and longing into one spectral performance. The result is a macabre, dreamlike meditation on creativity and control, where the boundary between creator and puppet blurs until the audience is left to question what is real, what is imagined, and who truly holds the strings.
