Maniac

Maniac (2012) opens with Frank Zito stalking a young woman home from a Los Angeles nightclub. He follows her through empty streets, ambushes her in her apartment lobby, stabs her, and scalps her on the floor. The film is shot almost entirely from his first-person point of view; we see Frank himself only in reflections. He returns to the rundown mannequin restoration shop he inherited from his abusive mother and nails the scalp onto one of the vintage mannequins he keeps as makeshift companions.

Frank runs the shop by day and hunts by night, dissociating during the killings — sometimes imagining tenderness or romance with his victims even as he is mutilating them. He stalks women through online dating and the subway, scalping each one and adding her hair to a different mannequin he poses around the shop and his apartment. Brief flashes paint his mother as a hairdresser who entertained men in front of him and treated him with calculated cruelty; her voice continues to murmur in his head, alternately seductive and accusing.

A young photographer named Anna comes into Frank's shop interested in using his vintage mannequins for an upcoming art show. He is drawn to her and represses his violence around her, helping her transport and pose the mannequins for her exhibition. Their collaboration becomes a fragile facsimile of a normal relationship — until Anna's independence and her dating life stoke his jealousy and abandonment fears, and he begins to project his mother's perceived betrayals onto her.

His killings escalate in parallel. Police investigate the rising count but never reach him directly; the threat that breaks Frank's composure is internal. Anna gradually pieces together clues — a familiar piece of jewelry, a too-realistic head of hair on one of the mannequins — and confronts him. His careful persona collapses. He attacks her, swinging between pleading not to be left behind and uncontrolled rage.

Anna fights him off, wounds him, and escapes. Frank, bleeding and alone in his shop, slips into a final hallucination: the mannequins come to life as the women he killed and converge on him, tearing him apart in retribution. Reality and delusion fuse — onscreen we watch him torn open by his victims, but he is in fact dying on the floor of his own wounds, surrounded by silent mannequins. The film closes on Frank's body amid the figures, never letting the viewer cleanly separate what happened from what only happened in his ruined head.