Erik's thoughts on "Maniac"

     In horror movies, a woman-in-peril's greatest adversary are her high-heels. Briskly walking home to escape what lurks menacingly in the night, she will trip, fall, and become increasingly frustrated with the shoe choice which society demands she wear to look sexy at nightclubs. Throughout Maniac, a remake from director Franck Khalfoun, we are often treated to this cliche, suggesting that maybe next time they should head barefoot to the park.

     A serial killer movie with Oedipal, Norman Bates-like implications — when a little boy sees his mother do coke and have threesomes, he's bound to grow up a little screwy — Maniac features Elijah Wood as Frank, a purveyor of dead white women and their bloody red scalps. Frank collects said scalps to place on his "women" back at the family-owned mannequin shop, humanizing and often haunting Frank's every waking moment; left to run the shop after his mother's death, Frank forms a domestic household consisting of a domineering man and inanimate women, nagging and disappointing him daily. 

     From hi-tech dating websites to lo-tech old fashioned street stalking, Frank spends his evenings collecting victims, and Khalfoun has fun with the staging of these macabre sequences. One involves an apartment wooing featuring "Goodbye Horses," the song prominently heard in The Silence of the Lambs when Buffalo Bill plays hide-and-seek with his privates as a mannequin watches in the background; Maniac's lead goes through a similar scenario when he frighteningly envisions himself as a genital-lacking plastic figure. Frank is eventually gone down on, but the woman literally doesn't come for air as the recipient grabs her throat and chokes her to death. Later, in a play on the barrenness of Los Angeles after dark, Khalfoun features a helpless woman running from empty subway station to empty parking lot to avoid Frank. Where is everybody? Los Angeles is the perfect setting for the usual implausibilities of genre fare.

     As to be expected, there is a heroine, Anna, placed at the heart of the story, meant to counteract our personification with Frank's evil, and lucky for him she is a photographer of mannequins working on her next art exhibit. In an ironic twist, the exhibit features Frank's faceless mannequins with Anna's face projected onto them. The uncanny has come to life. Soon after, Anna's boyfriend is revealed to be pompous, shallow, and of the belief that Frank is gay, aka a non threat to his and Anna's shared relationship. Each of Frank's murders are related to sex as either self-fulfillment or self-punishment, so the claim that he is homosexual provokes him to dismiss it quickly. 

     Also of interest: the film states that all of Frank's female victims are Caucasian. Anna's boyfriend is African-American and portrayed as an asshole, although not murderous. Frank is a psychotic killer seeking sympathy and maternal recognition. And so, despite the carnage on hand, Frank comes off as more likable than Anna's boyfriend, and for the first time how Frank views himself compared to other men (men who look different than him, that is) is questioned. It is then no surprise that Frank later lashes out against a Hispanic man looking to protect Anna.
 
     Maniac's selling point is that it's quite often told from the POV of its lead. The camera lens serves as Frank's eyes and our gateway into the narrative, and the film is thus filled with subjective camera placement and imagery. We see Frank, that is, he sees himself, often through mirror reflections. When he experiences headaches and relies on pills and nasal spray to cure them, we too become junkies looking for the next fix. Sure, there are moments where Khalfoun is forced to shoot outside of Frank's POV (i.e. a scene involving an apartment high-rise game of tie-up), but those are necessary moments of characterization as the first person device occasionally deserves a breather. Will the video game, first person shooter generation feel the effects of being placed inside the mind of a killer? Desensitization to the technique will either provide viewer liberation or condemnation.

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