Manipulation (2026) Review: Lovely to Look at, Hard to Follow

Film Title: Manipulation (2026)
Cast: Radoslav Gavlas (Matteo), Pawel Lawrynowicz (Master), Heino Ferch (Father Vitus), Anna Čtvrtníčková (Anna), Féodor Atkine (Juraj), Predrag Bjelac (Robert), James Faulkner (Archbishop), Arnaud Binard (Ivan), Pavel Kříž (Professor)
Director: David Balda
Writer: David Balda, Markéta Hrubešová, Vladimír Koubenec
Distribution: Mescalito Film (Italy); Filmwelt (Germany)
Production: Balda Film
Release Date: May 14th, 2026 (Italy); June 11th, 2026 (Germany); November 6th, 2026 (UK); November 12th, 2026 (Czech Republic)
Watched on: Thursday, October 8th, 2026 (screener)
Review by: Mother of Movies

Visit the official site for the film: Manipulation Full Movie Website

A Secret Society Thriller – “Manipulation” Review

I chose Manipulation purely on its title, because I’ve had plenty of experience being manipulated. The film has more, and it spends its whole runtime practising on the audience. Nothing is explained until the plot is almost over, and I restarted the opening twice just to work out what was going on.

Conspiracy thrillers usually hand you a clear villain and a ticking clock by the fifteen-minute mark. Manipulation hands you a committee, a Latin watch and a word, “enemies,” repeated until it stops meaning anything.

For the opening twenty minutes I had no clue what was happening. A man with a gravelly voice gaslights his wife, then berates her for talking. Their son Matteo is being prepped for something solemn involving rituals, robes and a lot of men in rooms, while a committee talks about threats and enemies. They say “enemies” about six times in one stretch without once saying who these sketchy people are. When someone admits he doesn’t know what it’s about either, I laughed and restarted. The film isn’t a comedy. At all.

The second pass helped a tiny bit. There’s a card placing the story “somewhere in the 21st century in Central Europe,” which I only noticed on the rewatch, and it did nothing to jog the memory I (do not) have of any Catholic story. A man who looks like James Bond rides in a limo, reading a Bible-like book by lighter flame, with a Latin-inscribed watch and an entourage.The accents are good, though. I never got that pang of “oh no, terrible accent,” even if with so many of them I couldn’t always catch what was being said.

Aesthetics

This is the aspect that works. The lighting is nice, the sound is nice, and the voiceovers sit in exactly the right places. The setting, the symbolic references and the costuming all feel genuine, from the church scenes to the suit Matteo wears to a party where his mother is told to go home and not get drunk. The funniest part is that I’m not religious, so I had no idea if any of the symbolism was telling me something about the story.

Explanations by Lecture, Romance by Montage

The film does try to catch me up. Matteo goes to a lecture, then has a conversation afterwards about an emperor, omnipotence, cults and manipulators. The explanation I took away was that a cult relieves you of the ability to make decisions, and I’d have called that life. It’s also where I stopped being lost and started being bored, because I could finally see the shape of the thing and it had taken far too long to show it to me.

Along the way Matteo gets a love interest and a couple of sex scenes, and I couldn’t tell you what any of them were for. At one point he’s mobbed by adoring people overseas, and I couldn’t work out whether they knew who he was or he was just popular.

There is a story under the fog, and I got there in the end. Two rival groups, one young man caught between them, and a lot of secrets that matter more to the characters than to us. It just doesn’t hit hard enough to justify the wait.

Final Verdict

Manipulation polishes everything except its explanations, which arrive far too late. It’s a screener, so I owed it the runtime, and when it started to drag I checked the length, assuming it would be ten hours long. It’s 128 minutes. It felt longer. If your idea of a good time is a conspiracy built from churches, robes and men who say “enemies” a lot, there’s a good-looking puzzle here. Just don’t be surprised if you end up restarting it, too.

Who Will Like This?

Not everything here is a problem. If you like church politics, secret orders and conspiracies, this is built for you: robes, rituals, religious symbolism and a history angle that reaches back to a Prague emperor. It’s patient, talky and full of men in rooms deciding other people’s lives, in a European setting that looks and sounds the part. My mum would love it, and she’d have followed it the first time.

Manipulation is rated

2.5 Latin-inscribed watches out of 5.

Filmmaker Stamp

David Balda wrote, directed, shot and produced Manipulation at 24, his second feature after Narušitel, working with co-writers Markéta Hrubešová and Vladimír Koubenec. He shot in Bologna and Ferrara in May 2023 with the support of the Emilia-Romagna Film Commission, drew Heino Ferch, James Faulkner and Féodor Atkine into the cast, and premiered in Rome before releases in Italy, Germany, the UK and the Czech Republic. Taking on secret societies, the Church and an international co-production that young is a swing most filmmakers never get to take.

Where Can I Watch This?

What Happens in Manipulation 2026 Movie – Spoiler Section

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