Extreme­ly Wicked, Shock­ing­ly Evil and Vile

When the first trail­er for Joe Berlinger’s Ted Bundy biopic dropped, it was met with wide­spread inter­net deri­sion, as view­ers railed against the curi­ous com­ic tone, as well as the deci­sion to cast all-Amer­i­can heart­throb Zac Efron as a ser­i­al killer respon­si­ble for the mur­der of at least 30 women. That a two-and-a-half minute trail­er could inspire a pletho­ra of think pieces about the val­ue of art about evil men and the so-called ​‘glam­ouri­sa­tion of ser­i­al killers’ proves that some 30 years after Bundy’s death, he con­tin­ues to cast a long shad­ow on pop culture.

Yet our col­lec­tive fas­ci­na­tion with true crime (and in turn ser­i­al killers) has exist­ed for cen­turies – from Jack the Rip­per and Eliz­a­beth Batho­ry through to the Zodi­ac Killer and Son of Sam. While many films based on hor­rif­ic true events can be exploita­tive and unnec­es­sary, there is still room for those that add some­thing to our wider under­stand­ing of events, or – more impor­tant­ly – the vic­tims, so often for­got­ten in nar­ra­tives swept up with their shock­ing subject.

In the­o­ry, then, Joe Berlinger’s Extreme­ly Wicked, Shock­ing­ly Evil and Vile, based on the mem­oir of Bundy’s long-term girl­friend Eliz­a­beth Kloepfer (also known as Liz Kendall), has a sol­id premise, seek­ing to reveal the insid­i­ous and dev­as­tat­ing impact Bundy’s crimes had upon the woman clos­est to him.

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.

Yet the star of the show is unques­tion­ably Efron, who cap­tures the charm and manip­u­la­tive streak which enabled Bundy to mur­der 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.

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 Bundy’s 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’s ego and increas­ing­ly des­per­ate attempts to avoid incar­cer­a­tion. 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 hard to see the film as a glam­ouri­sa­tion of ser­i­al killers – the inten­tion seems to be to high­light the dan­ger­ous charis­mat­ic sociopa­thy of Bundy, and the ways in which mon­sters are often hid­den in plain sight. Berlinger’s film fails for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Efron’s cast­ing feels like a twist­ed com­pli­ment to Bundy, who prob­a­bly would have been quite pleased to be por­trayed by a hand­some, bonafide Movie Star. And as a biopic, the film seems over­ly fas­ci­nat­ed with its subject’s mythol­o­gy, fail­ing to show any­thing about him that isn’t already there in archive footage. It only scratch­es the sur­face of the true deprav­i­ty Bundy was capa­ble of.