Extreme­ly Wicked, Shock­ing­ly Evil and Vile – first look review

Direc­tor Joe Berlinger is on a bit of a Ted Bundy kick at the moment. His new Net­flix doc­u­men­tary series, Con­fes­sions with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, was released just last week, and the dust had bare­ly a moment to set­tle before his dra­mat­ic fea­ture on the same sub­ject pre­miered at Sun­dance. Based on the mem­oir of Bundy’s long-term girl­friend Eliz­a­beth Kloepfer (also known as Liz Kendall), Extreme­ly Wicked, Shock­ing­ly Evil and Vile seeks to reveal the insid­i­ous and dev­as­tat­ing impact Bundy’s crimes had upon the woman clos­est to him, while also giv­ing Zac Efron his most ambi­tious role to date as one of America’s most noto­ri­ous ser­i­al killers.

We first meet Kendall (Lily Collins) as she waits to meet with Bundy at Flori­da State Prison, before the time­line shifts back to their first meet­ing years ear­li­er at a col­lege bar in Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton. The charm­ing, hand­some Bundy quick­ly appeals to Liz, and their life togeth­er seems idyl­lic, until Bundy is arrest­ed in Utah and sub­se­quent­ly accused of aggra­vat­ed kid­nap­ping. From there Liz’s life begins to unrav­el, as she is forced to reeval­u­ate the life she built with Ted.

The star of the show is unques­tion­ably Efron, who cap­tures the charm and manip­u­la­tive streak which enabled Bundy to mur­der 30 women across sev­en states over a four year time­frame. It’s a the­atri­cal, absorb­ing per­for­mance which works in part because of Efron’s own cultish celebri­ty, but also because he man­ages to con­vey some­thing dark and sin­is­ter lurk­ing beneath the pol­ished sur­face. It’s easy to under­stand why Bundy was able to oper­ate for so long, and why he was able to escape from police cus­tody twice – he just didn’t fit the pro­file of a typ­i­cal ​‘ser­i­al killer’.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the mag­ni­tude of Efron with­in the film means that it isn’t real­ly Kendall’s sto­ry, and Berlinger nev­er real­ly com­mits to her point of view. Although the film avoids gar­ish­ly recre­at­ing Bundy’s crimes (for the most part), we nev­er gain any sense of who the vic­tims actu­al­ly were, or the true extent of the bru­tal­i­ty they were sub­ject­ed to. Instead Berlinger’s film becomes a curi­ous court­room spec­ta­cle that revolves around Bundy. He’s the sort of char­ac­ter who sucks the air out of a room, and against Efron’s jug­ger­naut per­for­mance, Collins just can’t quite keep up. Only in the film’s final con­fronta­tion between Kendall and Bundy do we begin to ful­ly appre­ci­ate what was tak­en from her by him.

It’s evi­dent that Berlinger’s inten­tion is to high­light the dan­ger­ous charis­mat­ic sociopa­thy of Bundy, and the ways in which mon­sters are often hid­den in plain sight, but it fails to show us any­thing about Bundy that isn’t already there in archive footage (which also appears at the end of the film), and only scratch­es the sur­face of the true deprav­i­ty its sub­ject was capa­ble of.