I’m worried that I really like Maniac It’s not an easy thing to admit to, you see. The film is terrible. I don’t mean that it’s badly made – quite the opposite – it’s well acted and artfully made.

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It’s terrible in the other, darker sense of the word – as in it’s violent, gruesome, shocking, and extremely cruel. You want to disavow your enjoyment but can’t, because it’s also entertaining, darkly amusing, smart, and impeccably well-made.Maniac is a loose remake of the cult 1980’s horror movie of the same name, with Elijah Wood taking on the role of Frank, an unassuming mannequin restorer who is also a maniac. He spends his nights prowling the streets of LA, stalking and murdering women. Admittedly, it sounds like fairly standard slasher movie stuff but there’s much more to Maniac. From a technical point of view, the film is particularly striking since it’s told almost entirely from Frank’s warped perspective using ingenious POV photography. This isn’t an idle stylistic flourish, though, since it has a serious impact on how the audience experiences the movie.Maniac is incredibly brutal and graphically violent – Frank removes the scalps of his victims in excruciating close-up shots – and seeing it through Frank’s eyes only intensifies the violence. It’s almost like you’re enacting his obscene thrills, in some way complicit with this awful violence. It instantly recalls Peeping Tom and the opening of Halloween, and all those countless inferior slasher movies that followed, where we see through the eyes of the killer and his hands, effectively, become our own.

Placing the audience in this perspective can potentially be troublesome, making viewers complicit with the violence. It intensifies the physicality of the violence but at no point does the film ever elide the horror of Frank’s actions. If anything, the horror expressed by the victims is more unnerving when viewed from Frank’s angle, since the audience registers the terror in the faces of his victims, while Frank remains psychotically numb to their fear. Like the victim, we can’t stop him doing terrible things, and impotently we are forced to watch them die. And they die in some truly horrific ways thanks to unbelievably good special effect work.

The film runs the risk of being accused of wanton sadism but importantly it never elides the suffering of its victims and, ultimately, despite his terrible deeds, you sense the film’s real victim is Frank. In effectively-orchestrated flashback sequences, in which the present day and past begin to meld, you get an uncomfortable and surprisingly touching glimpse into Frank’s abusive childhood. His mother was a junkie who slept around, with Frank often watching from the shadows as a child. These sequences, along with the murders themselves, achieve an awful type of beauty – that's mainly down to some ethereal cinematography, rousing editing, and a stirring synth soundtrack. Director Franck Khalfoun must take a lot of credit for marshalling this precarious balance so well. In other hands, the end result could have been something quite abysmal.Elijah Wood’s diminutive frame is occasionally glimpsed only in reflections, and the contrast between his sickly and sweet appearance and the brutish acts of violence he commits is jarring yet very effective. Strange as though it is to say, Frank is really rather likeable and pathetic, and his diffident persona really helps sell the film and it’s sick premise. He’s charming in an odd sort of way and you genuinely feel sorry for him. There’s also a terrifically black sense of humour underpinning the entire film – for instance, Frank has to keep stocking up on bug spray to ward of all the flies that begin to congregate around his recent kills. But the comedy also stems from Frank’s inability to process the full significance of his murderous actions. Ultimately, Frank just wants to be loved, to not be abandoned, and the only way to prevent that from happening is to make the other person incapable of leaving. So it’s not entirely sweet.The supporting cast is small but plays its part admirably. Nora Arnezeder is worth singling out; she plays Anna, Frank’s new friend and possible love interest. She’s charming and attractive, and comes into her own late on in the film. (I won't say much more than that.)