Director : Franck Khalfon
Cast : Elijah Wood, Nora Arnezeder, Genevieve Alexandra
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Elijah Wood is a man who has seemingly done everything he can to stop being typecast as fantasy characters after his role as Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings. Since then he has a neuroscientist with stalkerish tendencies in the excellent Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a hooligan in Green Street and the voice of a possessed puppet in the animated "9", and he continues that trend in Maniac, a remake.
I've got severely mixed feelings about remakes. Some fall into the excellent side of the argument. The Thing (1982) and The Fly (1986), Night of the Living Dead (1990) and Dawn of the Dead (2004), for example, are a few of my favourite films and all are remakes, however, I could probably sit here for a long time and list films that are shockingly poor remakes, so I am always cautious when it comes to watching remakes.
I first heard about Maniac whilst on the London Underground and a very large poster, however, upon searching for when it was on in or near where I was living at the time (Newark), the nearest showings were all in London. Infact, outside of London there didn't seem to be any showings anywhere. I found myself asking the question "How good can a film really be if it's not being shown at 99% of the cinemas in the country but isn't straight to DVD?" Don't get me wrong, some of my favourite films didn't come out at the cinema, such as the previously reviewed Exit Humanity, but something always strikes me as unnerving about a film that some have deemed good enough to be released at a cinema, but only a very, very small percentage.
Anyway, Wood plays Frank Zito, a man who is mentally disturbed and leads a double life. By day he is the respectable owner of the family's mannequin business, my night he is a murderer. With his mother being a prostitute during his childhood, Zito struggles to develop relationships with women but does eventually meet a French woman called Anna. As time goes on Zito struggles to lead a double life and keeping Anna away from the other half.
Let's start with the few positives that there are from the film. Firstly, Zito keeps the body of an early kill in his bedroom throughout the film, and you gradually see it decompose and become surrounded my flies. The acting throughout the film is generally good and other than Wood, it was refreshing to see a relatively unknown cast. It's unusual to see a film with very established actors outside of the teen-horror (Final Destination for example) genre.
Now onto the negatives.
The film is shown in a first person perspective, all from Zito, meaning that Wood is only in the film when looking in a mirror, again there is something quite unusual about that as although you can hear what Zito is saying and/or thinking, it's hard to really get his sense of confliction without being able to see his face on the majority of occasions.
I found this film ultimately disappointing. The trailer made it look reasonable but I found it to be very slow, generally uninteresting and other than the final 20 or so minutes, completely unengaging. Whilst not completely awful, it's definitely a bit "meh".
To put this into some context, I would put this into the group of films that I call "Watch once and be comfortable in the fact you will not watch it again!"
