Maldoror — Fabrice Du Welz

A tasteless trend in movie marketing to reveal titles one letter at a time transitioned seamlessly into movie-making at some point in the last decade or so. Once in a blue moon, the slow and climatic title reveal works in the marketing for a long-term inactive franchise with a significant following; most of the time, it’s just arrogant, a bold assumption that the title of a movie means something to an audience that has not yet seen it. It never works in movie-making itself, and any film that cashes in on the trend instantly loses a bit of this viewer’s grace. Maldoror, a Belgian film with a title that presumptively references the novel Les Chants de Maldoror, uses such a meaningless trick to reveal a title that means nothing to the average viewer (even a French-speaking one). The film’s own justification for the title is as a nonsense name for a secret surveillance operation of an infamous Belgian pedophile, and this anti-creative decision turns out to be an predictive of the woefully misguided and frankly arrogant film that it precedes.

It won’t take a genius to spot Maldoror’s obvious similarity to David Fincher’s Zodiac. Orbiting the actions of a real-life criminal, both films follow obsessive men of the law in their predatory pursuits of the felons.

Continue reading at In Review Online.