By Keri O’Shea
It could all have gone so wrong. It would have been oh-so easy for Maniac (2012) to be yet another entrant in a now vast catalogue of shoddy, pointless reboots. The original is beloved of a hardcore of film fans who like their violence sleazy, but I hope it’s fair to say that it’s no world beater as movies go – it has its charms, but it’s no major classic, and upon finding it was to be remade, my only response was to roll my eyes and shrug my shoulders. What a pleasant surprise, then, that Maniac is such a superb, gritty, stylish horror movie, a film which manages to be both very simple and nicely complex.
The plot as written doesn’t seem to deviate much from the original, and it certainly doesn’t sound as if it could give way to anything complex at all, but here it is: Frank (Elijah Wood) is a loner who continues to run the mannequin business owned by his late mother in a suburb of Los Angeles. By day, that is. By night, Frank epitomises just why LA can be such a dangerous place; whether using internet dating, or just tracking down women in his car, he cannot fight his urge to hunt and kill – taking the scalps of his victims as souvenirs. One day, when an artist, Anna (Nora Arnezeder) asks to photograph his mannequins for a project she’s working on, Frank soon finds himself in what appears to be a functional friendship with her. Will Frank be able to maintain this, the only relationship he has in his life, or will his murderous self take over? The answer to that question is played out in an increasingly nightmarish, unrelentingly tense manner.
From the get-go, Maniac pulls no punches, immediately giving the impression of a practised, pathological figure operating on the fringes of the city – watching, waiting, following, not quite of the real world but a threat to it nonetheless. And, from the get-go, I felt very involved with the central character, which is what for me makes this film so successful. This is a film which is prepared to take stylistic gambles and they pay off, every time. For instance, the introduction of the first-person POV which is used for nearly all of the movie, and which is thrown in there as a curveball a few minutes in, has the potential to come off contrived, but it doesn’t. Instead, it does two things very well. Firstly, it makes us, the audience, compliant in what is happening. We’re not just watching what unfolds, we’re one and the same with the perpetrator. At times, this is a genuinely chilling sensation. I cannot say I enjoyed the experience, and no doubt nor was I meant to, but being made to see and do everything that the killer does? It’s a device well used here. Secondly, it allows a particular kind of empathy to spring up. If not filmed from Frank’s perspective, I feel that it would have been more difficult to get a sense of character beyond the killer, and yet when privy to his innermost thoughts, his anguish and his turmoil, additional shades of ambiguity are possible.
Director Franck Khalfoun does extend the perspective of the film beyond Frank’s own view however, as the narrative progresses. He seems to bring to bear on Maniac the kind of ingenuity we saw in Haute Tension; Frank is not left faceless for long, and we see him in photos and reflections – a nicely-used set of visual tricks, which isn’t laid on too heavily, but which does just what it needs to in order to begin to humanise our lead guy. Of course, this could all have come apart at the seams without a powerful lead performance from Elijah Wood. Casting him was a bold move, considering he’s so well-known for that other series of films where he very definitely doesn’t scalp anyone, and taking the part was something of a gamble, but Wood is excellent. His physicality makes him interesting, because he doesn’t come across as some belligerent meat-head but rather as someone who is believably messed up and, in a messed up way, rather frail. Wood does a lot with a little to achieve all of this, and it must have been challenging to enact the role whilst being off-screen for so much of the film. However, he works with this, making every gesture and look count, and I was especially struck by what he does with his stance. The alteration between anxiety and aggression is all in the body language, even when we aren’t hearing him speak.
Another aspect of the film which I enjoyed (and you’ll have to forgive me for all the adulation here, folks) was how the theme of the mannequins played out, and how it contributed to the visual fabric of the film. The mannequins bridge the gap between real and imagined, perfect and imperfect, encapsulating the real push/pull in Frank’s desires. Real women are desirable, but unsafe. Mannequins are perfect, but not real. Lots of scenes neatly conflate living women’s bodies with the mannequins’ own, and then of course Frank literally blends real women’s bodies with them. Towards the conclusion of the film, this becomes increasingly eerie.
Maniac is of course a violent film, but I felt that its emphasis on quality rather than quantity was what made it unnerving – and I did find it unnerving actually, sometimes very much so. The kill scenes are prolonged, for one thing, and held in unflinching focus; there’s no panning away, no allowing us to avert our gaze. It did cross my mind, as I watched, whether I found this at times so disturbing due to being a female viewer, and the jury’s still out on that one, but after all, there have for all of us been moments, I’m sure, when you find yourself having a moment of doubt about the person walking behind you, or the person who strikes up conversation with you, and knowing that, in a worst-case scenario, you’re not physically strong or fast enough to defend yourself. Essentially, you know you’re probably going to come off worse. Maniac is all about the worst-case scenario, and it’s strikingly well-wrought.
Making something sophisticated out of what is ostensibly very straightforward, Maniac is a triumph. Forget it’s a remake. I soon did. This is an accomplished, tense piece of film, and very much its own beast.
Maniac will be released in the UK by Metrodome on 1st July 2013. For another take, here’s Ben’s review from FrightFest 2012.