Zac Efron is incredibly good as a serial killer Ted Bundy, but for what purpose?

It is always interesting when Zac Efron darkens. In any case, in the cinema. It was presented to us in such an airy and healthy manner – singing, dancing and having sparkling eyes in the Disney Cultural Basin High School Musical – that it is still amazing, 13 years later, to see this glow harden a glow. He did it more effectively in Neighbors transforming his chiseled features and ropey figure into agents of painful threat. And now, he has become very dark in the role of serial killer Ted Bundy in the new film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday [19659002]. molding. In addition to his heinous crimes, Bundy was renowned for his disarming beauty and charm. But he was certainly not a sun god at Efron's level. Efron's presence in the film gives this film an extravagant atmosphere, reinforcing the insidious call of the legend of American serial killers in an almost badgraphic film. The user experience may vary depending on the natural functioning of Efron's magnetism, but I was fascinated by the disease.

Which is a kind of triumph for Efron, proving that he can do Greatest Showman razzle-awesome and sociopathy shifty with the same persuasiveness. But it's also a bit of a problem, an additional charge of our culture of sick serial killers that the film, directed by documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger, does not count enough. Extremely Wicked is not a hagiography, but instead places Bundy so clearly in the center of the film that we can not help but invest ourselves in its judicial leaks. He is the hero and Berlinger fails to properly contextualize Bundy's sad loyalty.

The film tries, mainly spending enough time with Liz Kendall ( Lily Frank ). who was Bundy's girlfriend when the police finally closed the door. We are watching Kendall alongside his man, despite growing discomfort, a growing belief – or rather, a resignation – that Bundy has never been what he said. It is a potentially fascinating and depressing arc of character to explore, adoring curdling so extreme. And Collins – so good two Sundances two years ago in To the Bone – is up to the task. But Berlinger tells her the same story all the time: Kendall drinks and smokes at home while ignoring the phone calls of an incarcerated Bundy. Kendall's situation is only valid in a final confrontational scene.

To the credit of the film, when we are with Bundy, we do not see him at least not raping, murdering and maiming women. We have saved almost everything. Extremely Wicked focuses instead on Bundy's trials and prison breakouts, his slippery character and his unwavering insistence on his innocence. Throughout his journey, Efron has maintained a captivating intensity, cleverly infusing Bundy's appeal with creepy crawling. As someone who can move his ears (or pecs), Efron strangely masters his natural charisma: he can change the frequency in a subtle way but rich in communication. It's a controlled and thoughtful performance; a mature, too. He does the work of so many Sundance stars in turn, reframing the profile of an actor at a crucial moment in his career.

But again, I'm not sure what all this thinking really gives us as an audience. And as a culture! I am probably as guilty as anyone of not only having participated in the current real crime boom, but also of ingesting serial killer fictions since I saw The silence of the lambs . (A story inspired in part by Bundy.) And yet, something in the current discourse about the kind of stories we want to tell and how we want to tell them, dislodged the thing in me that prevented me to stay attached to that kind of things. stories; I have trouble finding the justification for prurience. Extremely Wicked only promotes disgust, even if he tries to give us a new and more human angle on all this horror.

Maybe that's my fault – or my bias – but I left Extremely Wicked wondering what was the purpose of it all. Why did Efron choose to show us this aspect of his abilities in this way? Why Berlinger – who also has a documentary series on Bundy that has just been published on Netflix – is so seduced by this story, which is almost obvious in its sordid and insane tragedy. In the worst case, the movie seems almost sympathetic to Bundy. Its title is taken from a statement read by Judge Edward Cowart ( John Malkovich ) while condemning Bundy to the death penalty, a tired speech that also included a sort of unfortunate vow that Bundy could have used his intelligence and resourcefulness something good and productive, as if it were the real loss, the real shame, here.

At the end of the film, Berlinger lists the names of all the known victims of Bundy, perhaps to redirect our attention to the people. who really matter in this story. But these women are such faceless non-entities in the rest of the film that this brief, dark acknowledgment seems almost cruel in its casualness. If we really only take a film about a man who has murdered more than 30 women, it's "Zac Efron, it's surprising," so I do not think that film has earned its existence. Yes, all this is terribly naughty and mean and vile.

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