Perfect sacrifice. Unlike mass murderers, suicide bombers and other (non-)people who take other people’s lives in packs, serial maniacs have settled in cinema so firmly that it seems almost impossible to make any fresh film with their participation. Numerous horrors and slashers have turned this form of human essence into a simple formula - an interesting mask is formed with a sad story or a manneristic philosophy, after which textured visual murders, gallons of blood, screams, hoars and other classical attributes of the genre are added to these two elements. To somehow stand out against the background of monotonous pictures, there is only one way - to consider not the murders themselves, but what precedes them, to make the most important not the weapon that takes life, but the one who holds it, that is, to focus on the character of the maniac and his interaction with people, including future victims. A good example of the implementation of this strategy is Frank Halfon’s film “Maniac”, which, despite the banal title, boasts content with a reverse characterization, combining the story of the killer’s relationship with his ideal victim, the bloody candor of the unbridled slasher, a full-fledged portrait of the character of the classic serial maniac and an interesting approach to the visual part of the film. A couple of years before that, debutant Derek Lindeman, along with his painting “The Girl from the Calendar”, decided to act in a similar way – his work also tells how a seasoned killer meets the ideal victim and finds himself with her in a relationship closer than the last breath of a person gives the opportunity to watch. Only here the other elements present in the film are not as good as in the aforementioned “Maniac”.
The first thing the director had to do was decide on the genre and make it more obvious. "Girl from the calendar" jumps between banal horror, with blood color of paint, a sad comedy about a modest diner and a stupid melodrama in which the main character has fans even among local homeless people. Not that the mixing of genres does not have the right to exist, but it is very difficult to cope with the debutant, especially if he chooses for his film the slippery theme that Derek Lindeman chose for himself. In his work, there is a lot of unnecessary information and unnecessary moves that do not allow the viewer to focus on the main idea and make less obvious what the author wants to say with the help of his heroine. And to tell him there is something - Lindeman managed to create an extremely textured character, which can never be said at first glance about the aggressive girl in black, who became in use after the appearance of the trilogy about Lisbeth Salander. Gradually, this heroine from the banal image of a gota-thorn, scaring people away, begins to turn into something closer to the character of many of us, namely, a person who denies death and believes that it can happen to anyone but her. For her, the possible contact with the darkest side of human nature is a matter of pride, and the death of a person she knew becomes the subject of scabby jokes. With this attitude, her “love” with a serial killer became a good move, which once again shows the heroine’s confidence in her own exceptionalism, that she can outplay death and not only take her away from herself, but also save others.
However, the director lacked the talent to seriously develop such a theme and focus on these two people and their interaction. Despite the fact that Lindeman talks extremely much about the everyday life of her character, it is mostly information that has no practical value - who she met, how she spent last new year and what kind of alcohol she prefers. Numerous sharpnesses, pronounced by her, at first help to better understand her character, but at a certain point they begin to get bored. The excess of information creates a huge number of motives for the action of the heroine after the discovery of the sinister truth, many of which even contradict each other, which in the end almost completely kills the texture of the image. The director also has a bad understanding of another character in his film, namely a serial killer, in whose image Lindeman shows a complete lack of knowledge about the subject of his cinematic research. All he says about him is either stereotypes created by cinema, such as the fact that all killers are “artists”, write in the newspapers and commit their atrocities on a schedule, or actions that contradict the very essence of the maniac, lovingly studied by hundreds of experts. And well, the Zodiac wrote messages to the print media and not all maniacs are amenable to classification, but this will not change the fact that the director of the film “Girl from the Calendar” could not dwell on one topic, which is why he got a naive picture where the friendship, love and native comfort of a local diner wins, which does not seem possible in the world of a person who is closely in touch with true evil.