MEGALOMANIAC - Mark Reviews Movies

Megalomaniac, Dark Star Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 7, 2023

Writer/director Karim Ouelhaj takes inspiration from the story of a real, unidentified serial killer for Megalomaniac, a thoroughly disturbing but superficially provoking movie that's presumably about the cyclical nature of violence. It's mostly about the violence, though, as the children of that murderer live in the shadow of their father's legacy. One sets out to continue it, and the other, seemingly oblivious to the murderous ways of her sibling, finds herself caught up in different violence and potentially moving toward committing some of her own.

Appropriately, Ouelhaj's approach to this material is oppressive and horrific. The look of the movie, shot with cinematographer François Schmitt, is dark and grimy, not only in the remote mansion where the two adult children of the murderer somehow live in squalor, but also in the factory where Martha (Eline Schumacher), the naïve but psychologically troubled daughter, works and on the streets, under the overpasses, and out in the country where her brother Félix (Benjamin Ramon) stalks and brutally kills unsuspecting women.

As presented here, the world is an ugly and unforgiving place, and for Félix, that's just how he knows and has accepted it. For Martha, she still has a lot to learn about just how awful things can be for her and women like the ones her brother abducts and kills behind her back.

We know—or, at least, hope—the filmmaker's main point here isn't as simple as that, if only because the movie does revel in the violence perpetrated by Félix. He grew up watching his father, the so-called "Butcher" who left body parts of his victims in garbage bags around the city a few decades prior, do his despicable work.

A prologue shows us one of the Butcher's captives giving birth to Martha in the serial killers remote lair, as a young Félix watches and is silently charged to care for his new sister. He does, as much as a man who possesses no quality—or, in terms of the screenplay, characterization—beyond the fact that he is a secretive murderer of women.

Then again, Félix needs Martha more than she needs him. She works as a janitor at a local factory, where a pair of bullying co-workers (played by Pierre Nisse and Quentin Lasbazeilles) eventually escalate their verbal abuse to physical and sexual assault. Her seemingly normal lifestyle and regular income gives Félix the freedom to come and go from the house as he pleases, while also ensuring that no one even knows he exists. If Martha ever discovered that, the siblings' stories would probably be much different, but Martha has unspecified mental health issues—a lot of insecurity and a habit of having conversations with a cruel version of herself.

All of this is presented as the abject horror that it is—from the vicious scenes of Félix pummeling and slashing random women to the portrayal of Martha as a prisoner of her brother, society, and her own mind. This is a mercilessly nasty movie, which means it had better have something to say beyond the obvious that such physical and psychological violence is, well, nasty business.

If it does, Ouelhaj's narrative and style keep what might be some deeper purpose at bay. The story is pretty much split between Félix's killings (Each scene is unsettling, because of the realism of the violence, but one in particular feels especially pitiless, because the camera lingers on the victim's suffering in such detail) and Martha's various challenges. She has to deal with the abuse and assaults at work, as her boss (played by Wim Willaert)—despite standing up for her in an early moment—allows it to happen, and the curiosity of a new social worker (played by Raphaëlle Bruneau). Martha also starts to discover the full extent of Félix's activities, while pleading for her brother to bring her home a "pet" from one of his excursions in order to keep her company.

One supposes the deeper goal here has to do with power, especially when Martha does get her wish. She proceeds to treat a captive and mutilated woman (played by Hélène Moor), who possesses no character and literally has no voice to communicate anything other than pain and misery, in the same way everyone else treats her. Did she learn this from the world, or was she born to become this? Eerie scenes of the father and some painted-black ghosts of his victims haunting the mansion certainly don't point us toward an answer—or, really, a question, for that matter.

They do, though, continue the suspicion that Ouelhaj has made little more than a grubby, grisly horror story in more than just appearance. Megalomaniac is undeniably unnerving in its depiction of various forms of violence and in its move toward a climax that could be described as just, if extreme, retribution. That, however, is all on the surface of a movie that doesn't seem interested or able to dig any deeper than that.

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