Review of Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019) by Bertaut1 — 21 Jul 2019

An interesting approach to the story, but the tone is poorly managed.

Directed by Joe Berlinger immediately after he completed work on Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is worth seeing for Zac Efron's performance if nothing else, but is a strangely muted affair. Telling the story of Bundy from the perspective of a woman who was oblivious to his true nature is an interesting narrative choice, and had Berlinger stuck to this format, it could have made for a fascinating film. However, what begins as an intriguing insider's look at living with a killer shifts into an underwhelming courtroom drama, only returning to its original tone in the final (fictional) scene.

The film begins in 1969, the night Bundy (Efron) and Liz Kendall (Lily Collins) first met in a Seattle bar, with the duo quickly falling in love. However, six years later, when he is stopped in Utah for a minor traffic violation, he finds himself accused of a series of murders across California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. Meanwhile, it becomes harder and harder for Liz to deny there's more to her boyfriend than she ever imagined.

Very loosely based on Liz Kloepfer's memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy (1981), and written by Michael Werwie, one of the biggest appeals of the movie is the casting of Zac Efron as Bundy. And it has to be said, he's excellent. Especially if you watch the film after the docu-series, you'll pick up on the depth of the performance; his every movement and gesture, the way he smiles, the way he stands, the tone of his voice, everything is perfect.

One of the film's most notable components is that, apart from one brief scene near the end, there is no depiction of violence, attempting to present Bundy not with the 20/20 hindsight of history, but with the same degree of ambiguity with which Liz would have viewed him. Instead of the nature of his crimes, Berlinger focuses, at least in the first half, on how a killer can lie and manipulate, coming across as completely normal to all who know him. Berlinger has said that the film is about the mechanics of how a person can be "seduced by someone capable of evil", and it was his intention that the audience actually like Bundy – just like Liz, he wanted them to be seduced by evil.

However, the film has a lot of problems. For one thing, because it depicts Bundy not as we now know him but as his contemporaries saw him, it means we only see the performative side, never the monstrous underbelly. Sure, this means that the film avoids exploitation, but in doing so, it could be accused of sanitisation, as the film's Bundy is a lovable rogue who bites his thumb at the system, not a murderer, a man who raped and butchered a 12-year-old child.

I understand that Berlinger wants to depict how Liz could have been blinded by devotion to a man that she thought (correctly, as it turned out) was too good to be true. But the problem is that she herself is never characterised enough for this to work; everything we learn about her is predicated on her relationship with him - there's nothing about her life prior to meeting him, for example. Additionally, the focus shift as the film transitions from Liz as subjective focaliser to a more objectively focalised courtroom drama makes very little tonal sense. It's almost as if Berlinger loses interest in Liz when the sensationalist trial begins. This transition reduces Liz to a cycle of watching the trial, crying, doubting his guilt, and drinking, as she's effectively stripped of what little agency she had in the first half.

Another problem is that we learn nothing new about Bundy himself; there's nothing about his childhood, for example, or how he got away with the murders for so long, whether he really loved Liz, or if he genuinely lacked the ability to feel empathy. Along the same lines, we learn nothing about the victims. This was also a problem in the docu-series, but it's far more pronounced here, and because of this, the decision to put the names of his known victims on screen at the end of film is unearned, crass, and meaningless.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is by no means a bad film. But it could have been so much better. It initially looks at how evil can hide in plain view, creeping into our lives under the guise of normalcy, but Berlinger allows this theme to recede into the background as he hands the narrative over to Bundy. If this was supposed to be Liz's story, Berlinger takes his eye off the ball badly. And although the film certainly doesn't sympathise with him, and although the decision not to show any of the murders is commendable, the fact is that, yet again, Ted Bundy has become very much the star of his own show.