Marwencol

Mark Hogancamp was a 38-year-old drunk in 2008, when five men followed him out of a Kingston, N.Y., bar and beat him into a coma. After 40 days in the hospital, he went home brain-damaged and with no memory. He then began processing the trauma by creating and photographing World War II dioramas and stories in which action figures and Barbies became the soldier alter egos of him and his acquaintances. As this odd and sometimes unsettling therapy expands and serendipitously winds up as a solo show in an Greenwich Village art gallery, Jeff Malmberg’s documentary becomes a surreal and haunting magical mystery tour of not only Hogancamp’s imagination but also his blossoming understanding of himself and where he now fits in the real world—if he does at all. The film is messy, and one highlighted revelation is more anti-climatic than startling, but totally fascinating.