Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019) Review

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

The 4 is for a strong premise the film doesn’t 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’s not present. Lily Collins is doing the better work and Zac Efron got the attention, and the reception repeated the film’s own mistake.

This one frustrates me more than a plain bad film would, because the right movie is sitting inside it. Every time it drifts away from Liz and back into a courtroom, I can feel the story I wanted leaving the room. By the end I admire one actor and I’m irritated with whoever decided where the camera should go.

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 can’t answer. That’s what it was like from inside.

Liz Kendall lived with Bundy for years, reported him to police herself, heard him insist repeatedly that he was innocent, and didn’t know with certainty until he told her. That’s a story about the mechanics of belief. How somebody holds two incompatible things, what evidence does and doesn’t do to conviction, and how long somebody who’s lying can love a person.

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’s barely present until she’s required for the ending.

That’s the failure and it’s structural instead of a matter of execution. A film about how a person is deceived can’t spend its second half with the deceiver, and the picture loses me once it does. I’d have stayed in that apartment with Liz for the whole running time and let the trials arrive the way they arrived for her, as phone calls and news she can’t control.

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’s a defensible choice with a stated justification: the film is showing the audience how he worked. Making a viewer feel the charm is a legitimate way of explaining how he took in a great many people. The counter is that the film never charges for it. There’s no sequence where the film punctures the charm, 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. They’re entertaining sequences: he goes out of a window and through a ceiling, and both are staged as capers with the audience on his side. Those escapes are the choice I like least in the whole picture. Scoring a real killer’s getaways like a heist comedy is a lousy call, and nobody making the film seems to have asked who that fun is for.

What It Will Not Show

The film depicts almost no violence. That’s presented as restraint and works as evasion.

There’s 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 doesn’t earn it, because avoiding the violence isn’t the same as reckoning with it.

The victims are almost entirely absent. They’re names read in a courtroom, and the film gives no space at all to who any of them were. That 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.

This is what makes me angriest about the film. It spends a hundred minutes on the man’s charm and can’t spare one of them for a single woman he killed.

The single depicted moment arrives in the last five minutes, as a confession delivered through glass, and it’s the most effective thing in the film 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 convincing for a hundred minutes can’t be surprised when the audience finds him strong. It arrived alongside a documentary series about the same man on the same platform in the same year. That compounded the effect.

Berlinger directed both. That 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 real and recurring problem with the category and it’s 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. That 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

The role the film is supposedly about belongs to Lily Collins, and she 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 can’t let go, and has a scene with her daughter where she tries to and can’t 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 won’t describe.

For the middle stretch, Lily Collins also has to play almost entirely alone, in an apartment, drinking, receiving calls. It’s thankless material and the performance keeps something running underneath it: a woman who has decided not to know and can’t stop knowing. Collins is the reason I’d give this film any points at all. She’s playing the movie I wanted, scene by scene, inside a movie that keeps walking away from her.

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. It’s a 4 because I can see the good film it abandoned, and that makes the courtroom sequences harder to forgive than they’d be in a lazier picture. A premise about the mechanics of belief gets traded for trials the protagonist never attends, and a charming performance goes by without the film ever charging the audience for enjoying it. I resent that waste more than I dislike anything on screen.

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