Director: Franck Khalfoun
Starring: Elijah Wood, Nora Arnezeder, and America Olivo
Plot: A shop owner stalks attractive woman at night
Review:
This is a remake from what seems to me to be a pretty classic (or at least cult) horror flick. I have never seen it, so I don’t know how they compare. Just sayin’!
Elijah Wood plays Frank, the owner of a mannequin shop who by night stalks and kills women he sees on the street. He scalps them to keep as trophies and tries to remake them as one of his mannequins. When he meets an artist who takes a liking to his mannequins, he tries desperately to keep those urges quiet.
Maniac is shot entirely from the point of view from the killer reminiscent of a found footage movie. It is its greatest strength and greatest weakness. Sharing the POV with the killer means that his delusions and psychosis are OUR delusions and psychosis. When Frank tries to recreate these women by stapling their dripping scalps to one of his blank mannequins, he sometimes sees the actual woman. They are in a kind of trance. They don’t seem completely capable to move independently, but sadness is smeared all over their face almost as if they were desperately trying to stop following the commands of Wood’s Frank. He also occasionally has visions of his mother who was either of very easy woman or an actual prostitute. It is revealed that he used to watch her exploits from the closet, and in moments of great stress, he relives those moments either in his own bedroom or on the city streets. It also gets us right up close to the action and gore. It is both thrilling and uncomfortable; a pretty damn good feeling for a horror flick to conjure up. Unfortunately, it also handicaps Elijah Wood as the main character.
There are three tools to acting (at least as far a I can tell, I’m not a teacher LOL): facial expressions, voice inflection, and body language. People used to worry about the Spider-Man movie because we couldn’t see his face even though he still had his voice and his body language to act with. It wouldn’t be easy, but not so bad either I would think. Here, Elijah Wood is missing 2 of those things (body language and facial expressions). There are a few mirror effects and a few out of body experiences, but that doesn’t really make up for it. It seemed to me that Elijah Wood was putting in one hell of a performance, one of silence and nuance, yet we didn’t really get to experience it because technically he was behind the camera lens. It also seems like Wood would occasionally speak some very unnecessary dialog to make up for what wasn’t clear enough due to the POV cinematography. Not to mention how dizzying it can be.
Maniac is a deeply flawed movie, but, despite the issues, it definitely seems like a nice original take on the slasher genre (unless there is another POV slasher out there I don’t know about which is more than possible) and is worth a look for how creative it tries to be.
Rating: 6/10
What Else to Watch: My favorite gimmicky slasher movie is Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a deconstruction of the whole genre.
So that’s how they did the POV
