Filmed almost entirely in first person, Maniac follows a deranged young man, Frank (Elijah Wood, Sin City,
seen in mirror shots and in photographs), who hunts down beautiful women and takes their scalp back to his mannequin studio in a horrifically violent ritual.
Not exact matches
So what do I do when I turn on the TV to
see news of another
shooting, when I realize that neither political party comes close to representing the radical teachings of Jesus, when I get tired of receiving emails from «Save Darfur,» when I look
in the
mirror and
see the worst sinner who has ever walked the earth, when I honestly have no idea how to resolve the question of how pacifism could ever be justified
in light of Auschwitz and Buchenwald?
I know when you
see your flaws every day
in the
mirror; you worry about how a man will react to your full body
shot.
I'm always surprised to
see people posting grainy photos, or
shots with so much glare you can't make out the person's face, or pictures taken while staring at a reflection
in the bathroom
mirror.
VIOLENCE / GORE 6 - A man breaks through a hotel room door and holds a gun on a woman as they yell at each other, he holds the gun to his own head and under his chin, he slams her into a
mirror, she kicks him
in the crotch and runs away, he
shoots at her and the bullet ricochets off a car and grazes her cheek (we
see blood on her face).
It's actually astonishing that we not only have great actors nailing tricky scenes, and really some stunning, winding camerawork to go with it, but such things as the weaving
in of special effects and the utter lack of capturing any of the off - screen crew members who surely must have been around helping with the
shoot (that we never
see anything we shouldn't
in any of the many on - screen
mirrors is quite astonishing) only makes this one of the more brilliant efforts at
shooting a seamless film since the first
in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.
You could
see similar elements
in Lodge Kerrigan's chilly «Claire Dolan» (with a dash of Polanski
in there — an unsettling manicure scene followed by a startling
shot involving a
mirror on an armoire)-- and, sure enough, it turns out that the young, unknown Bahrani so admired Kerrigan's work that he sent him an early cut of the film and asked for Kerrigan's advice.
«I wanted to bring balance to these two families and I
saw it more as a dark
mirror of each other,» she says, crediting her actors for embodying these hardened and layered characters so deftly during a 26 - day
shoot on location
in Louisiana.
The result is a trim, scrubbed work, as strange and distilled as a mid-1930s Tod Browning chiller, where the smallest hint of sentimentality or whimsy (say, the girls dancing to a pop song) is literally short - circuited and the
mirror the heroine stares into
in the final, closure - denying
shot might have been pieced together from the same glass shards
seen in the unnerving opening credits.
It's hard to tell
in these spy
shots, but it looks like the R could have matte coloured
mirrors as well, instead of the gloss black
seen on the Mk6.
With the
mirror in hand, Sam can peek under doors to
see what's on the other side and then mark certain targets that he will automatically
shoot once he opens the door.