MANIAC: Cover Your Eyes

Director: Franck Khalfoun
Writers: Alexandre Aja, Gregory Levasseur
Cast: Elijah Wood, Nora Arnezeder
Runtime: 89 mins.
2012

This movie. . .

Let me first say that Maniac combines my discussion of found footage in my End of Watch blog post with my discussion of slasher films in my Scream blog post.  It is a found footage slasher film, without actually being as simple as either one of those things.

Let me second say that if you are squeamish, or don't appreciate being made to feel profoundly uncomfortable, you probably shouldn't watch this movie.  Note that I said "appreciate" rather than "enjoy."  Either way, there is no enjoyment to be had here.

Maniac is about a sociopath named Frank (Elijah Wood) who is compelled to stalk, murder, and scalp attractive women so that he can attach their hair to the mannequins that populate his shop and home.  He speaks to these mannequins, enacts domestic scenes with them, but all the while he knows that what he is doing is reprehensible.  Overwhelmed by migraines, psychotic episodes, and a boatload of mommy issues, he also knows that he cannot simply stop.  So he continues to stalk attractive women through the abandoned streets and hallways of Los Angeles, to the excellent backdrop of Rob's creepy, synthy soundtrack.

Let's get the complaints out of the way first.  Maniac is by and large a plotless affair, and the acting is hit or miss (the dialogue doing nobody any favors).  Wood's anxious monotone sometimes worked for me and sometimes didn't.  I will say this about Wood though--his adolescent demeanor makes him a convincing cute-but-still-terrifying kind of serial killer.  I assure you he is immersed in his character enough that you will not often be distracted by thoughts of Frodo Baggins.  The performers who play his victims alternate between convincing and wooden, as if they are speaking directly to a camera.

It turns out, they sort of are.  For the first minute or two, I thought Maniac was going to be yet another found footage horror film.  Then I realized it was something else, something far more interesting--a POV movie that puts you relentlessly in the perspective of the killer.  With a few key exceptions, you are seeing out of the eyes of Frank.

I used the David Ayer film End of Watch to analyze found footage films, and discuss how they do or don't work.  My conclusion was that for a found footage film to be effective, the camera itself needs to be a character with a role and an arc.  Maniac's POV camerawork succeeds because it literalizes that in an astounding way--the camera is our protagonist.  What we see is what Frank is looking at.  This ups the creepy factor and allows shots to resonate in a far more powerful way than typical found footage.  It even manages to circumvent the sloppy arbitrariness of the mise en scene in most found footage films.  This cinematography is steady, precise, and pointed.

Not only that, but the gimmick teases out the themes of the movie.  There is some serious male gaze stuff going on here.  For every taboo that Frank commits, for every lingering stare he allows, we are right there with him, committing and leering in the exact same way.

This perspective could easily abandon the protagonist to the audience's complete loathing, but the film doesn't allow that.  Maniac manages to make Frank, the scalping serial killer, feel sympathetic.  This is really important, so I'll repeat it: We sympathize with Frank, while simultaneously loathing him for his atrocities.  When Frank tries to turn over a new leaf and court the woman he loves, Anna (Nora Arnezeder), we are rooting for him.  This might sound unbelievable, but Khalfoun pulls it off, and a lot of it has to do with the POV perspective.  Not only do we watch these women the way Frank watches them, but we also receive windows into his psychosis: the screen blurs when his migraines act up, a whole restaurant of people seem to be staring at him, and the people around him are startlingly replaced with sneering mannequins, or visions of his dead mother.  We understand what drives him to do what he does.  Not only that, but he's an artist.  He restores antique mannequins with care and sensitivity.  This, combined with the voyeurism of the camera, forces us into some serious reflection about the intrinsic perversion of the artistic lens.

Critical reception for this film has been divisive at best.  According to Stephen Whitty, I am an idiot for claiming that this film makes valuable commentaries about the male gaze and the social forces that create monsters.  Others call the film torture porn at its worst.  Even many of the positive reviews question its value.  I understand why.  If this were a typical found footage film, the up close and personal gore sequences would be meant to thrill us in that, "Ew gross, look away!" guilty pleasure sense (side note: the gore is very well done, as expected from the people who brought you the gore in The Walking Dead; especially effective were some abstract, disturbing human/mannequin meldings).

But I think Maniac aspires to something greater.  It implicates us.  It's not a good time.  By melding the camera with our psycho killer protagonist, and characterizing him so distinctly, we aren't meant to thrill at his conquests--we are meant to despair at his failures, and feel ashamed rather than gleeful at those moments when we want to look away.  This film made me physically uncomfortable in a way few other horror films have, and I think that feeling is productive.  It forces us to face the darkest corners of ourselves.  There is nothing remote and other about Frank the serial killer--he is close, personal, and right there with us.

Maybe I've just been watching a lot of mediocre horror recently, but Maniac blew me away.  It's one of the more personally affecting horror films I've seen.  If one of the purposes of storytelling is to bring us into a perspective we could have never otherwise comprehended, then Maniac succeeds with flying colors.  And those colors are mostly red.

4 / 5  BLOBS