Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019) Review

A young single mother meets a law student in a Seattle bar in 1969. He is charming, is good with her daughter, and over the next decade is arrested, escapes twice, is tried on television, and continues telling her he is innocent.

The 4 is for a strong premise the film does not commit to. Liz Kendall’s account is the only interesting way to tell this story, and the picture repeatedly leaves her to follow him into courtrooms and jail cells where she is not present.

Lily Collins is doing the better work and Zac Efron got the attention, and the reception repeated the film’s own mistake.

The Premise Was Right

Telling this from the perspective of the woman who lived with him is the only angle that offers something new, because it asks the question the record cannot answer, which is what it was like from inside.

Liz Kendall lived with Bundy for years, reported him to police herself, was told repeatedly by him that he was innocent, and did not know with certainty until he told her. That is a story about the mechanics of belief. How somebody holds two incompatible things, what evidence does and does not do to conviction, and how long a person can be loved by somebody who is lying.

The film understands this in its first twenty minutes and then loses interest. Once the trials begin, the picture follows Bundy because the trials are dramatic, and Liz becomes a woman in an apartment receiving phone calls. By the last act she is barely present until she is required for the ending.

That is the failure and it is structural instead of a matter of execution. A film about how a person is deceived cannot spend its second half with the deceiver.

The Efron Problem

Zac Efron is good in it. The performance is calibrated, the charm is real, the shifts are precise, and he plays somebody performing sincerity instead of possessing it.

The problem is what the film does with that. It shoots him as a leading man, gives him the courtroom sequences, lets him be the funniest person in several scenes, and repeatedly frames him as somebody to watch instead of somebody to assess.

That is a defensible choice with a stated justification, which is that the audience is being shown how he worked. Making a viewer feel the charm is a legitimate way of explaining how a great many people were taken in. The counter is that the film never charges for it. There is no sequence where the charm is punctured, no cost imposed on the audience for having enjoyed him.

Compare what Man Bites Dog does with exactly the same technique. That film makes you like somebody and then makes the liking unbearable. This one makes you like him and rolls credits over photographs.

The film also gives him the escapes, which are genuinely entertaining sequences. He goes out of a window, he goes through a ceiling, and both are staged as capers with the audience quietly on his side.

What It Will Not Show

The film depicts almost no violence, which is presented as restraint and functions as evasion.

There is an argument for it. Depicting these murders would be exploitative, the victims were real people with living families, and a film can make its point without recreating their deaths. That argument is correct and this film does not earn it, because avoiding the violence is not the same as reckoning with it.

The victims are almost entirely absent. They are names read in a courtroom, and the film gives no space at all to who any of them were, which means the picture has removed the violence and also removed the people. Monster does the harder version of this. Its victims are men in cars and each one is a person for at least a minute before anything happens.

The single depicted moment arrives in the last five minutes, as a confession delivered through glass, and it is the most effective thing in the film precisely because everything before it declined.

The Reception Problem

The film’s marketing emphasized Efron, the trailer was cut as a thriller with a charismatic lead, and a considerable amount of the response treated Bundy as an object of interest.

That happened because the film’s own emphasis invited it. A picture that frames its subject as compelling for a hundred minutes cannot be surprised when the audience finds him compelling. It arrived alongside a documentary series about the same man on the same platform in the same year, which compounded the effect.

Berlinger directed both, which explains most of it. The same person made a four-part documentary using the recorded confessions and a feature that declines to depict anything, released within months of each other on the same service.

This is a genuine and recurring problem with the category and it is worth naming as a craft issue instead of a moral one. A work about somebody who was charming will be charming, and the only defense is structural.

What Zodiac does instead is refuse to make the killer a character at all. What Prisoners does is remove certainty. What Henry does is remove the audience’s position. All three are structural answers to the same problem and this film has none.

John Malkovich plays the judge and delivers the admonishment the film takes its title from, which has since been quoted widely as though it were a compliment. That reception is the whole problem in a single line of dialogue.

Collins Is Carrying It

Lily Collins has the role the film is supposedly about and gets perhaps forty percent of the running time.

What she does with it is the best material in the picture. Liz is drinking through the middle section, is unable to explain to anybody why she cannot let go, and has a scene with her daughter where she tries to and cannot finish the sentence.

The final visit is her scene and the film knows it. She goes to see him, asks the direct question for the only time in ten years, and the film gives her the answer in a way I will not describe.

Lily Collins also has to play the middle stretch almost entirely alone, in an apartment, drinking, receiving calls. It is thankless material and the performance keeps a specific thing running underneath it, which is a woman who has decided not to know and cannot stop knowing.

That sequence is what the whole picture should have been. A woman asking somebody to stop lying to her, in a room, with a decade behind it, and the answer arriving in the last possible form.

Should you watch Extremely Wicked?

Only for Lily Collins and the last ten minutes. A genuinely good premise about the mechanics of belief, abandoned in favor of courtroom sequences where the protagonist is not present, with a charming performance the film never charges the audience for enjoying.

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