Monster

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * *)

The case of Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer who killed six men (including a cop) she had picked up while trawling for tricks on the Florida freeways, has inspired not one but two films already. Documentary-makers Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill made films about the real Wuornos: the first, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer in 1992, focussed on the attempts of her lawyer, her mother and the police to sell her story to the highest bidder; the second, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, which will screen in next month's Showcase mini-festivals, delves deeper into her abusive childhood and tracks her up to her execution, in October 2002, under a warrant signed by the state governor Jeb (brother of George W.) Bush.

The award of the best actress Oscar to the Keisha-beating South African actress Charlize Theron will give this film, the debut feature by writer-director Jenkins, stronger commercial legs, but the more discerning cinema-goer may want to treat it as a prompt to seek out the documentaries to get a deeper reading of the story.

For what has to be said is that Monster is so reverential of its subject as to border on the irrationally liberal. It is as if, in bringing Wuornos to dramatic life, it has lost touch with the essence of who she was; in its determination to humanise its subject, it has ended up legitimising - even lionising - her.

None of this is to detract from Theron's spellbinding performance. We need to go back a quarter century to Robert De Niro's Jake La Motta in Scorsese's Raging Bull to find a performance where acting craft is so seamlessly deployed.

In some ways it's better not to have seen the lustrous Theron before. Trying to find her pretty features in this character's freckled, jagged-toothed mask of desperation means admiring the artistry of the makeup. But Theron's Wuornos, a jittery, hyperventilating bundle of nerves, swinging wildly between panic and bravado, rage and excitement, is pre-eminently an actor's piece of work.

We meet her first sitting on a freeway embankment, down to her last few dollars and discussing with a God she plainly doesn't believe in whether to take her own life. Instead she swings into a bar which turns out to be a lesbian hangout and there bumps into the diminutive Selby Wall (Ricci), a tentative newcomer to the lifestyle, who is plainly awed by Wuornos' swagger.

The two hook up together, a study in contrasts whose passion is compellingly plausible and form a relationship replete, from its first moments, with bleak dramatic ironies ("You'll never meet someone like me again," Aileen says).

She senses in Selby the possibility of the kind of affection she has never known and Selby thinks she's found a protector and provider. But as the big woman slots into her new role, flagging down, servicing and fleecing lonely men, things start to get deadly.

The film makes clear that Aileen's first killing is an act of self-defence when she is abducted and virtually raped, but pretty soon the killings take on a life of their own, each covering the tracks of the one before. The most harrowing is that of a timid family man who wants to help Aileen. By then though she is driven by a messy tangle of emotions - the need to make money and impress Selby, hate (of herself, of men, of everything), maybe even simple bloodlust and his certain silence is all she needs.

The film delivers as mesmerising a piece of screen acting as could be wished for but it's desperately grim and gloomy - almost every scene is underlit so we visually grope to make sense of it. It's only at the end as it hurriedly depicts the dramatic development that was Wuornos' undoing, that she begins to take on the status of a misunderstood heroine, rather than the monster the title promises. It's a failure of dramatic nerve that is sure to leave a sour taste in some mouths.

In the final analysis, it's Theron rather than the film that makes the real-life madness that inspired it understandable. In a world full of senseless killing that has to be counted as some sort of achievement.

Cast: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Scott Wilson, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Lee Tergesen, Annie Corley

Director: Patty Jenkins

Running time: 111 minutes

Rating: R18, contains violence, sexual violence and offensive language

Screening: everywhere from Thursday with previews today and tomorrow.