Maniac is a difficult film to review. As a remake of a notorious Video Nasty from 1980 of the same name, this film sets out to drag us through the mud and generally make its audience feel not just uncomfortable but nasty. It is a relentlessly, oppressively difficult film to watch, but it also extremely, even uncomfortably, well made. Maniac sets out to do something that favors a pure lurid affect over anything else, and it succeeds entirely at meeting and even possibly exceeding those goals. Many viewers, however, will be so fundamentally turned off by the goal they won’t care.

Maniac stars Elijah Wood as Frank Zito, a young man who has recently taken over his family’s mannequin business and who secretly serves as the site for a vicious internal struggle over identity. On one hand, he’s mild-mannered, quiet, and painfully socially awkward, and on the other he’s unable to control internal urges to murder and scalp any female he meets and uses them to add a dose of unnerving human detail to his precious works of art. Continue reading →