There’s a serial killer on the loose in LA. As a shock jock-type DJ jokes about it being someone with ‘mommy issues’, your thoughts turn pretty quickly to the standard: a man who loathes women. Which, to be fair, it usually is, but not today: the killer we see dispatching a terrified woman on the city’s outskirts is also a woman. No great shock, perhaps, given the film’s title, but a shock overall. We then skip back in time, meeting the same woman – Frances, or Frankie (Dina Silva) – working out at the gym before heading into town to play a gig. The security guy won’t let her in, openly disbelieving her when she says she’s ‘with the band’. Actually she’s in the band, a struggling, if talented singer and musician hoping against hope to get a residency out of tonight’s performance. Straight away, it’s turned into Frankie’s fault if the band isn’t successful in this. She hasn’t been doing enough to work on her appearance; she doesn’t even look like she’s lost any weight. And so on.
Sadly for Frankie, this treatment she’s getting from others is starting to manifest in an open hatred of women who, for her, have made the prohibitive grade: they’re slim and beautiful, whereas she’s not and whatever she gets told quite openly by the people around her, her as-yet unseen alter ego says aloud in even stronger terms. There are more reasons behind this than simply the fact that she’s sick of hearing that she needs to lose weight, but for now, that’s where her frustration lies.
One day, she decides she can’t take any more but, as she attempts to end things once and for all, a strange figure emerges out of the scrub nearby. He seems to know Frankie, and seems to know a lot about her, too. Rather than encourage her in her abortive suicide attempt, he seems to want to instil a different approach. This man appears to embody something of Frankie, mirroring her to an extent. Is it just her alter ego in a different form? Or something else?
In any case, he’s quite keen to urge her on to some pretty shocking ultraviolence, and Frankie isn’t particularly resistant to the message. At first it all seems to be a grand redress of the unfairness which has dogged Frankie for years, but actually it turns out to be a lot more scattergun than that, a kind of indiscriminate lashing out at everyone Frankie perceives to ‘have it good’, whoever they might be, male or female. It’s an equal opportunities gorefest, if you like, and one which is absolutely brutal in plenty of places.
Frankie, Maniac Woman marks a break from director and co-writer Pierre Tsigaridis’s prior work: so far, he has tended towards no doubt grisly, but supernatural plotlines, whereas this is much more of a cynical, even darkly comic slasher fantasy. If this means the risk of tackling big-hitting topics like suicidal ideation in places, then it’s all in the service of a film, as a whole, which strives to balance its key moments of absurdity against material which, if not exactly profound, is still knowing and unflinching. Certainly, we have seen a lot of equally graphic and unpleasant scenes down through the years, and often perpetrated against women: at least Frankie, Maniac Woman dispenses with the rather hackneyed final girl motif to give us a key character who is both villain and victim. As an audience member, it feels tragic that she’s going after people who are as much at the mercy of what feels like a rigged system as she is – at least in some respects – but the great meaninglessness of the violence is part of the point. Frankie has nowhere else to go.
There is something of a pause before the film moves into a final act, but on the whole, there’s very little let up. Lead actress (and co-writer) Dina Silva is great throughout, likeable despite everything she does, able to play up to the film’s more humorous moments, but equally plausible as a violent tour de force with a well-aimed kettlebell. If The Stylist put a feminine spin on the kind of horror we saw in Maniac, then Frankie, Maniac Woman carries on with that same journey, even if eschewing the emphasis on frailty which is there in spades in Jill Gevargizian’s film. Frankie has her moments, and we see the origins of some of her instability, but she’s not written in such a way that she comes across as easily breakable. This isn’t a film which paints in fine strokes, but then nor is the world it’s critiquing (at least in its incarnation here), so its big, bold, visually-ambitious display has an irreverent charm of its own – even if there are some minor lulls and stumbles too. The only really unforgiveable thing would be if the film wallowed in the same aggressive misogyny it purports to loathe, but it doesn’t do that – even if all it chooses to do (and do well) is to point out its indignities in singular, eye-popping fashion.
Frankie, Maniac Woman (2025) premiered at Grimmfest UK on Friday 10th October.