Frankie Maniac Woman (Grimmfest 2025)

It can be tempting, when reviewing a low-budget film you have no real preconceptions of, to compare it with a recent hit. In the case of Pierre Tsigaridis’s Frankie, Maniac Woman, a graphic horror movie about a woman driven mad by unreasonable beauty standards, the obvious comparison point would be The Substance. While there are some moments that are comparable, most obviously a face-morphing mushroom trip, it’s not quite what Tsigaridis and his star and co-writer Dina Silva are really going for. It actually reminded me more of Abel Ferrera’s Driller Killer: set on the opposite coast, yes, and with a female lead, but ultimately rooted in the same observation that simply being an unsuccessful artist in a big city is more than enough to motivate a killing spree.

It doesn’t take much deductive ability to work out why artists might be drawn to this theme early on in their career. In the case of Frankie, Maniac Woman, Tsigaridis and Silva are reaching back to their 2019 short I Who Have No One, and any success they’ve had in the meantime hasn’t dimmed their sharp observations of life at the lowest rungs of the creative industries. Performing at a local bar, Frankie’s bandmates hiss abuse at her every time she makes a mistake. A promising meeting with a hotshot record producer ends in more humiliation as he proposes giving her song to a skinnier, more sexualised singer. Her agent calls her with an offer he thinks is irresistible: he knows some people who are setting up “a Wilson Phillips tribute band and they’re looking for the fat girl”.

After a few minutes of this, you completely understand why someone would snap and go on a machete rampage. And you do only get a few minutes of it, because Tsigaridis and Silva’s script doesn’t hang around. Even without the bloody pre-credits sequence, you’re not surprised to see Frankie starting to snap under the pressure of all this abuse before the six-minute mark. What we get after that is a series of incredibly cathartic scenes in which Frankie pulverises the skulls of all the sleazy men who mocked and dismissed her for her looks, weight and lack of success. And then, once that’s happened, we get a hell of a lot more.

I’ve read some reactions that criticise the film for this, that see Frankie, Maniac Woman‘s decision to move on from simply killing detestable men as a loss of focus. I can’t agree. A revenge fantasy can be fun but it is, ultimately, just a fantasy; there’s nothing you can take out into the real world with you. By contrast, for all its splashy wish-fulfilment violence Frankie, Maniac Woman ends up becoming a surprisingly real, complex examination of internalised misogyny. Frankie knows the male gatekeepers to her industry are the real villains, but becoming a serial killer doesn’t free her from the guilty resentment she feels towards thinner, more conventionally attractive women. Rather, it gives that resentment a new, dangerous outlet, one that the rest of the film shows her wrestling with.

It’s rich enough territory to complicate and deepen the slasher-film cliches the film knowingly plays with. Like a lot of horror-movie killers, Frankie is raised by a sex worker mother, but this experience leaves her with more than just the genre-standard terror of sex. Her mother impresses on her into the importance of performing for the male gaze, just as one of her mother’s clients leaves Frankie with a male voice in her head urging her on to more violence. The decision to make Frankie’s inner voice male, to have it viciously attack her weight as well as persuade her to kill, makes it harder to read her killings as simply good or bad. It is a feature-length exploration of Audre Lorde’s celebrated maxim that the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house, just with more disembowelling than you’d expect from that description.

None of this complexity interferes with the essential, lean, angry thrill of the film, which remains magnetic throughout its disciplined 95-minute run-time. Indeed, the best thing I can say about Frankie, Maniac Woman – and I have a lot of good things to say about it – is it’s the right kind of trash. Thanks to labels like Vinegar Syndrome and Shameless, there’s a lot of interest in old exploitation films these days, an interest which is usually shot through with a nostalgic sadness. It would seem to be impossible to make something so gut-level today, something that has that unapologetic grindhouse vim without becoming kitschy, ironic, pandering, edgelordy… and yet this exists. It is not an ironic B-movie for cult movie fans to tick off their reference checklists to – Frankie’s mask, which pushes her hair right to the back of her skull, occasionally resembles Divine in Pink Flamingos, but that’s about it.

Where so many modern exploitation movies are retrophiliac, this is contemporary and full of original ideas, throwing twists at its apparently simple set-up well into act three. And in place of smug, in-jokey irony we get actual purpose and passion, not least in Silva’s ferocious, thrilling central performance. Both she and Tsigaridis are wearing a lot of hats here: as well as co-writing the script, they both worked on production design, with Silva also producing, doing make-up and writing Frankie’s songs with her band Dina and the Headhunters. (Tim Armstrong of Rancid also contributes guitar over the closing credits) Tsigaridis, meanwhile, is credited with camera, lighting, editing and – a first among multi-hyphenate directors? – drumming. None of this results in a production that’s straitened or overstretched, with the desert locations of the movie’s back half particularly gorgeously captured. Frankie, Maniac Woman is slick and impressive where it needs to be, and it’s raw and id-level when it needs to be that. It is a small triumph of justified fury and sick wit, and it completely won me over.

Graham’s Archive – Frankie Maniac Woman (Grimmfest 2025)