No Man of God (2021): not the Bundy biopic you may be fearing (Review)

Amber Sealey’s first film, A + D, was a microbudget affair set in a London flat and starring the director herself. Her latest, No Man of God, is about Ted Bundy, one of America’s most obsessed-over criminals, and features Elijah Wood and Robert Patrick. That sounds like a big step up, but in some ways it isn’t: the drama of the new film is still focused on two people in a room. It also hasn’t made Sealey’s life much easier, with No Man of God criticised before its release for supposedly glorifying Bundy. Now it’s released on DVD and Blu-Ray by 101 Films, we can see that it isn’t the film people were dreading, just as Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile also wasn’t that film. There is, I would say, a level of moral discomfort over the idea of dramatising real-life murders that is perfectly reasonable. I would also say we exceeded that level a long time ago, and the initial response to Sealey’s film strikes me as overwrought, as if everyone is trying to suppress the guilt of watching all those trashy true-crime documentaries that fill up streaming platforms by taking it out on her.

Morally I would say the film is hard to fault. Far from the evil genius the tabloids treated him as, Bundy comes across in Luke Kirby’s performance as a man who’s about half as clever as he thinks he is on a good day, and becomes a snivelling coward as his execution date creeps closer. Artistically I have some misgivings, none of which are to do with the film’s star and producer Elijah Wood. He is very good as Bill Hagmaier, the criminal profiler who made it his mission to get Bundy to reveal the details of his unknown victims – and, more ambitiously, to express remorse for his murders. Throughout his career, Wood’s asset and hindrance has always been his eternally boyish looks, which make him perfect casting as a hobbit but hard to buy as what he seems to be in real life – an ordinary man in his forties. But as Hagmaier, he really does convince as a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, as well as remaining fresh-faced enough to convince you that he’d jump eagerly into trying to crack the world’s most notorious serial killer just because, hey, it’s a challenge, right?

We are some distance from the time when criminal profiling offered film-makers an exciting new way into crime narratives. The post-Thomas Harris gold-rush for stories about hard-bitten shrinks and caged monsters frequently treated profilers like superheroes, so much so that Malcolm Gladwell devoted a 2007 New Yorker article to debunking the idea that profilers had successfully mapped the criminal mind. (Very convincing it was too, although Gladwell’s career, in general, makes me want to read a reply article by some criminal profiler asking why we ascribe brilliant powers of insight to frizzy-haired tobacco industry shills with a habit of stating the obvious) No Man of God returns us to a time – if Netflix’s Mindhunter hadn’t already – when profilers were something close to prophets, with a closing caption that breathlessly reels off Hagmaier’s storied later career. But it does so methodically and unsensationally, and keeps us guessing as to whether Hagmaier’s efforts are going to yield results.

Kirby has a tricky job in that he is playing a character who may or may not be acting. I felt, initially, that he was overdoing the unblinking psychopath act; later on, it dawned on me that Bundy might be overdoing the unblinking psychopath act instead, to try and prevent Hagmaier getting to him. A defensible artistic choice, then, but one that makes it hard to fully suspend disbelief. I found myself most engaged with the film in the third act, and not just because it has the ticking-clock aspect of Bundy’s impending execution. Here, Sealey’s directing becomes more expressive, even dream-like, as Hagmaier risks losing his sense of professional boundaries. She also includes some magic realist touches which are handled – wisely – with complete sobriety, including some strange, silent young women who might represent the ghosts haunting Ted.

The pre-release controversy didn’t take into account the idea that a female director is unlikely to take the side of a misogynistic mass murderer. Sure enough, the film’s clearest moral statement is given to Aleksa Palladino as Bundy’s lawyer, who admits she’s never hated a person more than she hates her client, but she knows someone has to do this. That sense of duty, for her, comes from her belief in maintaining a fair system. For Hagmaier the answer is more complicated, but his faith is part of the equation. No Man of God was written by C. Robert Cargill, a regular collaborator with Scott Derrickson, both of whom have talked in the past about their experiences as Christians in mainstream Hollywood. (Derrickson was originally slated to direct) Knowing this makes it possible to read No Man of God as a drama about the uses and abuses of faith. Hagmaier’s unshowy, sincere Christianity is contrasted with the evangelicals who happily let Bundy wrap them round his little finger in exchange for some juicy quotes about how porn made him into a killer, or George H.W. Bush, depicted in archive footage praying at his inauguration, who will later allow Bundy’s execution.

There is a lot of archive footage in No Man of God, and according to Sealey it happened for the most prosaic reason: the COVID-19 pandemic hit during the shoot, so she couldn’t stage the planned scenes of crowds gathering outside the prison. The film is actually better for it; if all those shots of ordinary Americans laughing and cheering at an execution were recreated with extras, you’d accuse the British-born Sealey of cultural stereotyping. But they are very, very real, and they negate the need for the bonus features – which are limited to decent-length interviews with Wood, Kirby and Palladino – to include any kind of documentary about the real-life Bundy. Aside from anything else, he’s not the star of the film.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF NO MAN OF GOD

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