Maniac: Misses Its Own Accidental Brilliance

Maniac is a film shot entirely in first person about a psychopath who scalps women he meets on the internet and then staples their remains to a collection of mannequins. You can skip this one. It bothers me to say that a film can, and should, be ignored. Maniac is not just bad, it's detrimental.

A remake of the 1980 film by the same name, director Franck Khalfoun's take follows Frank (Elijah Wood) who owns a mannequin shop and spends his nights brutally murdering women, due in part to childhood traumas. Photographer/visual artist Anna (Nora Arnezeder) stumbles upon his shop while preparing for a gallery opening, and two strike up a romance which Frank hopes can survive despite the darkness inside him. The rest of the film exists in a plot-less void of stalking, executing, and re-purposing women, so that they can live forever as trophies in his apartment.

The big twist of this remake is the first person perspective, meant to place the audience within the life of a serial killer. While the mind reels at the possibility for grotesque transference and the potential for cerebral terror, Maniac rarely transcends beyond mild discomfort and certainly nothing bordering on actual horror, thrills, or ideas, despite the blood. I adore cinema and literature that operates within a moral vacuum, but if you don't have anything to say why take us there? Sexual violence and gore are cornerstones of this genre that can illicit powerful emotions ranging from disgust to comedy (in the right hands), but when your film shifts between boredom and disappointment it makes the viewer hyper-aware of what pointless endeavor this has become. I cannot remember the last time I was this angry with a film for wasting my time.

Simultaneously, I'm angry with the film for its wasted opportunities. First, Elijah Wood as serial killer (internally broken and not nearly with the assassin sheen of Sin City) is a casting choice I'd love to see… See. The first person perspective limits his appearances to the moments when Frank stares into mirrors, usually shattered ones, a filmic device you'd think screenwriter Alexandre Aja would have grown tired of after 2008's dreadful Mirrors. What we're left with is mostly Wood's heavy breathing while watching women undress. It would help build a bit of tension if it wasn't so annoying. I'd say the film would be much improved just by having Wood on screen, but there's nothing that could have fixed Aja's screenplay, which includes a scene between the leads where she offhandedly apologizes twice for "disturbing" the serial killer, and another where she drags Frank to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Most laughably, there's an early sequence where a girl seduces Frank and begins stripping to her favorite song, "Goodbye Horses" from Silence of the Lambs. A bad serial killer movie uses a painfully on the nose reference to a much better serial killer movie that employs a very successful first person sequence. Later, he brutalizes a woman while "Ave Maria" plays. This is Scary Movie level filmmaking.

Perhaps the best part of Maniac is the excellent score by Rob, which seems fitting that in remaking a cult film they would again produce something overshadowed by its soundtrack. The 80s synth pulses matched with lengthy shots of driving through downtown Los Angeles almost positions the film as a bizarro relative of Drive, but again, why bother dabbling in a bit of stylization if there's no point? I became excited when I noticed Frank's kills occur while he can see the LA skyline, and on one occasion he even seems to breathe the city in before committing his crime. While there could be a much more fascinating tether between his actions and the evil of the city, we are instead treated to flashbacks of a mother who did coke and had anonymous sex, as if the filmmakers didn't see the more interesting motivation sitting right there. The original was born from the grime of 80s New York, but the location transplanted offered no new information. The ball is dropped equally with the opportunity to portray insanity though the eyes of a serial killer. Given all the possibilities, the film only navigates into the truly bizarre once (before its god awful ending) and instead prefers to show us what migraine headaches look like, if only to provide another reason for Wood to run to a sink and spend more time gazing into a mirror.

Maniac is bland, forgettable, cheap, and not worth your time. That's what makes it dangerous. If the last two decades were spent complaining about the glorification of violence, how much worse is it to make violence boring?