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Maniac (2012)

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Maniac (2012)

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Maniac (2012)

2012’s Maniac is a slasher film with a lot to unpack. It’s not a movie you would ever call “fun” but that’s the point. Violent and disturbing, it's not for sensitive viewers and not the kind of picture you easily forget.

Schizophrenic Frank Zito (Elijah Wood) restores mannequins for a living. At night, he prowls the streets, latching onto women who remind him of his now-dead prostitute mother (America Olivo). After violent murdering and scalping them, Frank returns home and attaches his victim's hair to the many mannequins in his room.

The choice to shoot entirely from Frank’s point of view gets you thinking. Many slasher films have been accused of sympathizing with the killer rather than their victims; allowing the audience to see their violent crimes - crimes that often have sexual connotations - and relishing in the carnage. Often, this type of camerawork seems purely practical; it's a way to hide the killer’s identity (the original Friday the 13th for example) but it's still an unnerving choice because we switch to this point of view only when the killer is about to strike. These horror movies are shot normally, until we get to the violence. In 2012’s Maniac, there is no mystery. We know exactly who the killer is. We even know who the victims will be because we see everything Frank sees. Maniac is frightening because we never switch angles. We’re trapped in this viewpoint, unable to see anything except his violent, deranged acts.

The brutality on display is likely to be excessive for many viewers. Detractors would call the film misogynist - nearly every woman we meet is terrorized - but I’d disagree. Frank is certainly a man with severe psychological issues. His mother was an awful person who inadvertently created a monster, but nothing in the film tells us that the women he murders deserve their fate. Many of them are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some antagonize Frank. Others reach out and attempt to befriend him. What happens to these women has nothing to do with their behavior and everything to do with our protagonist.

You’d think that experiencing these events from inside Frank’s shoes would endear you to him in a way, but director Franck Khalfoun manages to avoid making him sympathetic. We explore his character plenty. There is a plot but most of the running time is spent with Frank and the aftermath of his actions. Despite this, he never feels anything other than sad and pathetic. I don’t mean sad in the sense that you want to hug him; this man is profoundly unhappy, completely lacking in self-control, totally delusional and an absolute menace. It’s hard to imagine anyone relating to him beyond the fact that he’s a human being. He may have experienced trauma but even his past doesn’t excuse this level of unhinged madness.

I was going to write down that the more I think about Maniac, the more I like it… but “like” is the wrong word. I’d say I admire it for the way that it doesn’t back down. There is no attempt to make gore and violence something palatable. The way it manages to put us in a different headspace than we’ve ever seen without making us empathize with this monster is admirable. You might not like it, but that doesn’t make Maniac a bad film. (On DVD, October 24, 2021)