Review: Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile Is Mostly Just Vile

With its very title, Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile offers a lurid come-on in the spirit of tabloids and horror movies. It also boasts a casting gimmick that would make John Waters and Lars von Trier proud. In Berlinger’s first fictional film since Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, former teen heartthrob Zac Efron plays Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Bundy kidnapped, tortured, and killed dozens of young women throughout the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s and ’70s, a saga that culminated in Florida with his arrest and a trial that ordered his execution, the first such to be televised. People were enraptured with this attractive, charismatic sociopath, and women flocked to his defense. Bundy is an instrumental figure in the modern media machine, and contemporary serial-killer fiction is also unthinkable without Bundy, who embodied a weird and disturbing intersection in American culture between eroticism and nihilism.

Berlinger has quite a bit of material to work with, then, as Bundy’s story offers an inherent fusion of horror and satirical courtroom drama. But Berlinger and screenwriter Michael Werwie, adapting Elizabeth Kendalls’s book The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, have another gimmick up their sleeves, which backs them into a corner. The film never shows Bundy’s murders, as a way of empathetically connecting the audience with his trusting girlfriend, Kendall (Lily Collins). Extremely Wicked, Shocking Evil, and Vile pivots on a strange form of suspense, expecting us to feverishly anticipate the confession of one of the world’s most famous guilty men, whom we just heard in another Berlinger production, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. With much of Bundy’s actual story unable to accommodate the filmmakers’ conceit, Berlinger skips around almost randomly between Bundy and Kendall as they respectively process his escalating infamy.

The notion of offering a thought game in which Bundy might be innocent is probably intended to humanize Kendall (a pseudonym for Elizabeth Kloepfer), as well as his other admirers, suggesting the universality of self-delusion. But this idea backfires spectacularly in the film, as Berlinger’s coyness shortchanges Bundy’s monstrousness, compelling the filmmaker to emphasize amusing cons and courtroom antics over rapes and beheadings. Imagine how creepy, and morally bankrupt, it might be if Charles Manson had been turned into the hero of something along the lines of Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can.

One can see how this willful coyness, which may be intended as satire, would appeal to Berlinger. A documentarian best known for the Paradise Lost trilogy, Berlinger is obsessed by the possibility of failing to discern truth, especially as it’s co-opted and spun by the media, including himself. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills is so terrifying because Berlinger and co-director Bruce Sinofsky, though defensive of the West Memphis Three, appear to nurse implicit apprehensions about their point of view in the case. Berlinger understands clarity to be a nearly unattainable luxury in media-saturated circumstances, and he brought this theme to the ambitious but misbegotten Book of Shadows, which suggested that horror-movie fandom was a potential gateway to brainwashing and evil. (In that film, Berlinger was still symbolically working through the Paradise Lost material.)

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile attempts to wrestle with similar notions of cultural brainwashing, suggesting that Bundy’s appearance and personality were valuable instruments of distraction from his carnage. But Berlinger, also ignoring the carnage, essentially indulges in the same act of willful distractedness as Bundy’s admirers.

Berlinger simply isn’t much of a fictional dramatist. He treats actors the way he films subjects in a nonfiction production, seemingly covering them and leaving them up to their own devices. Few scenes in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile exude much focus or follow through. The relationship between Bundy and Kendall, theoretically the backbone of the film, is communicated by a few trivial romantic montages and pillow shots and then more or less forgotten. Kendall’s grief over Bundy is dramatized with similar roteness, as we see her drinking and watching television, though Berlinger has no interest in Kendall’s blossoming alcoholism, or in the stunning breach of normalcy that the exposure of Bundy’s secret must have represented for her. Berlinger and Collins’s Kendall is a standard-issue, ever-miserable girlfriend, who could just as easily be waiting for someone to return from a war.

Efron is very game here, and in a better film he might have been extraordinary; he’s certainly more surprising than Matt Dillon was as a Bundy-like killer in von Trier’s The House that Jack Built. Dillon had considerable authority in that film, but he telegraphed his character’s malevolency and little else. Efron offers a subtler blend of sexiness and contemptuousness, elucidating the thin behavioral line between Bundy’s seductions and acts of violence, actions which Efron understands to have both depended on salesmanship. Lowering his voice, somewhat emulating Bundy’s haunting cadences, Efron remarkably captures that ineffable absence that often characterizes serial killers—the blank aura they project, as if there’s not quite a personality behind their eyes, which suggests a physicalizing of their lack of empathy.

But Werwei’s screenplay doesn’t give Efron enough to play with, eliding details about Bundy’s murders and his profound resentment of women, which was rooted partially in mommy issues and notions of class. Berlinger may think he’s omitting psychobabble, but he offers nothing in place of these absences. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile barely suggests a film but rather a collection of unfinished scenes that have been assembled haphazardly in an impression of free-wheeling spontaneity. It has that blankness of, well, a serial killer.