When Marnie Was There review: a magic melancholic supernatural detective story

Lonely pre-teen Anna prefers sketching and solitude to company; she even shuns her doting adoptive mother. When Anna suffers an asthma attack, her worried parents send her to rural Kushiro, where she happens upon a mysterious abandoned mansion and the equally enigmatic Marnie, a similarly aged girl with cascading blonde locks and old-fashioned attire.

The two quickly become firm (and secret) friends, but Marnie’s propensity for disappearing and reappearing suggest that she’s no ordinary 12-year-old. What’s more, she seems to induce memory loss in Anna, who wakes up after their encounters, inexplicably dirty or shoeless.

Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a long-time employee at Studio Ghibli and the director of The Secret World of Arietty, takes a painterly approach with this beguiling adaptation of Joan G Robinson's 1967 much-admired young-adult novel. The lovely renderings of moonlight on water and verdant landscapes might alone justify the ticket price.

Once thought of as the "last" film to emerge from Studio Ghibli before the studio closed for "pause" following the recent retirement of Hayao Miyazaki, Marnie, rather appropriately, is characterised by magic and melancholy. There are glimmers of Hitchcock's Rebecca and Christopher Nolan's Memento in the construction of this charming supernatural detective story.

The quasi-Sapphic intensity of Anna and Marnie's relationship – recalling Ghost World or a benign Heavenly Creatures – is poetically and sensitively handled.

It may not rival Miyazake’s best, but this Academy Award contender is easily worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ghibli’s classic teen dramas Whisper of the Heart, From Up on Poppy Hill and Ocean Waves, not to mention such non-Ghibli greats as Japan, Our Homeland and Mai Mai Miracle. In common with these films, When Marnie Was There meditates, Proust-like, on the past’s continuing influence.