A nasty hobbit: "Maniac"

The tawdry peep show Maniac sees that group of French horror extremists who were so in vogue five years ago (director Franck Khalfoun, writer-producers Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur) remaking a thirty-year-old VHS favourite using a point-of-view gimmick you'll recognise as either three years old (Enter the Void), fifteen years old (The Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" promo), twenty years old (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), fifty years old (Peeping Tom) or sixty-five years old (The Lady in the Lake). It's an original take on the source material, but only up to a point.

We're looking out at latter-day L.A.'s lonely-hearts scene through the eyes of mannequin hoarder, hair fetishist and sociopath Frank (Elijah Wood). The fact we're essentially watching Frodo: Portrait of a Serial Killer need not in itself be a dealbreaker: Wood, sensing an opportunity to expand his range beyond the cherubic and cutesy, has been grubbified in the glimpses we get of him in bathroom and rear view mirrors, and his boyish features speak to an arrested development that is exactly where his character is coming from.

No, the problem with Khalfoun's Maniac is that gimmickry: the shot (and shock) selection quickly becomes obvious - we're looking at whatever Frank's leering over - where a John McNaughton or Michael Powell stepped back from time to time and used the first-person perspective to make critical points about the observer(s). These films were adult, and serious, of course; this one gets us into its title character's head but one way - visually - and for all its Frenchy pretensions (laying the "Ave Maria" over measured shots of a female naked and hog-tied, having Wood's eye drawn to the fancy-schmancy activity at the neighborhood dance academy), its gaze remains resolutely adolescent. 

Khalfoun inevitably uses the conceit as another way of getting us inside the women's locker room, where you can see everything but a point, and sense the watcher isn't being critiqued so much as rewarded for his patience. Sure, there's plenty of the technical virtuosity these filmmakers have founded their careers on, and it is properly horrible when it sets out to be - secreting its scalp-slicing around the most squalid and worn-down quarters of this much-filmed city - but it can't get past a slavering fanboy psychology that regards the camera as merely a tool to get at women's boobs and entrails. Put another way: even if you felt Maniac needed a remake, you may not feel wholly enthusiastic about sitting in the same room as this one.

Maniac opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.