Megalomaniac Review: The Disturbing Belgian Arthouse Horror Film

Megalomaniac review: what the film is and what it does

Megalomaniac is a Belgian horror film from 2022, running 100 minutes and spoken in French. Karim Ouelhaj wrote and directed it, and François Schmitt photographed it. Eline Schumacher plays Martha, Benjamin Ramon plays her brother Félix, and the cast also includes Wim Willaert, Pierre Nisse, Raphaëlle Lubansu, Olivier Picard and Catherine Jandrain. It had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in July 2022 and its UK premiere at Grimmfest in Manchester on October 7, 2022.

The premise is built on a real case. The Butcher of Mons was a Belgian serial killer active in the 1990s who was never caught, and whom the review describes as having left women's bodies dismembered by the roadside. Megalomaniac imagines what the killer's children might have become. Félix, influenced by the family legacy, continues his father's killings. Martha, who works as a factory janitor, is bullied and abused at work, and she descends into madness and enters Felix's terrifying world.

The Rough Cut Review piece opens with a thesis about horror itself. Horror, it says, is weighted on a different scale from other cinema, often cheaper to make and quick to turn a profit, which makes it a fertile ground for indie voices. Great horror films make bold statements about the world, the way Ti West's X does with age, beauty and sexuality, or Ari Aster's Hereditary does with family and the interiorization of trauma. The review's complaint about Megalomaniac is that it does not say anything of that kind.

That complaint is the engine of the review, and it is worth separating from the film's craft, which the review praises without reservation. The piece describes visualization, composition, style and tone as excellent. Its trouble lies with what the excellent style is used for. In the review's reading, the film works at best as a story about a woman's wish for a normal life being crushed by the men around her, and at worst as a beatification of serial killers.

People who search for Megalomaniac usually want three answers: what the film is, whether it is as extreme as its reputation, and whether the awards mean it is good. This page takes them in that order. The short versions are that it is a Belgian arthouse horror film about the children of a fictional killer, that it is as extreme as its reputation, and that the awards speak to its craft more than to its comfort.

The story of Megalomaniac

The film opens with a bloody birth scene, which the review compares to the childbirth sequence in House of the Dragon, and which establishes the family's bond to violence. Martha lives with social anxiety and body-image problems, and her job is a dead end. After the abuse at the factory, which her boss witnesses and ignores, she is broken. She begins to embrace the family's horror, and even helps keep her brother's victims alive for prolonged torture. She sees a social worker and keeps up appearances so the family is not caught. She tries to live separately from Félix and is dragged back.

The structure is circular. Every attempt Martha makes to leave leads back to the house, the brother and the inheritance of murder. The review says that is both the film's point and its weakness: because it sells Martha so convincingly as a victim, she never has a real choice, and a character with no choice has no story to tell. There is no moment of hope, no ambiguity, and what remains is a murderer's origin story with a doppelganger device that stands in for contemplation.

The Butcher of Mons and the question of taste

The review raises an ethical point. The Butcher of Mons case is unresolved, and the review says that families of the victims still lack closure. Setting a fictional family story on top of that history is, in the review's view, a little distasteful. A second critic could answer that horror has always drawn on real crimes, and that the film presents itself as a what-if, not a retelling. Both views are fair, and the choice depends on how a viewer weighs a film's right to use history against the cost to people who lived through it.

Acting, camera and design

The strongest praise is for Schumacher. The review says her performance is intimate in a way that makes the viewer pity the character, and Grimmfest's preview material calls it astonishing. Fantasia gave her an Outstanding Performance award in its Cheval Noir competition. Ramon is described as haunting as a serial murderer. The photography by Schmitt is gothic, with high close-ups and wide shots of taxidermy-filled dining rooms, and slow facial expressions held before a death. Grimmfest describes the film as shifting between gritty social realism and a surreal, expressionist nightmare, and praises its detailed production design.

Technical accuracy is part of the review's discomfort. It argues that the actors are framed so the murders never feel staged, calling the stabbing scenes the most realistic it has seen, with the continuous feeling of attacking someone up close. That is the sense in which the review says the film achieves its aim: it succeeds in making a viewer feel terrible, and the reviewer finds it terrible that it does so.

Megalomaniac at a glance

Compiled from the Grimmfest listing, Eye for Film and ScreenAnarchy, linked in the sources below.

How the Megalomaniac review scores writing, acting and directing

The score line at the end of the review is brief, and the reasoning behind it is the most useful part of the piece. Megalomaniac gets a 2 for writing, a 5 for acting and a 5 for directing, and the final score is a 4. The final number is not an average of the three. The review says it knocked the mark down a little because it could not sit well with its conscience, so the 4 is a judgment about the film's effect as much as its parts.

Reviews of extreme horror often struggle with exactly this problem. A film can succeed at what it sets out to do and still be a film the critic does not want to endorse. The Megalomaniac review does not hide behind a compromise. It says plainly that the film achieves what it entails to do, that it does so with great skill, and that this skill is what disturbs.

Writing: why it scores a 2

The writing score carries the review's whole argument. The objection is that Martha's story has no choice in it. Each decision she makes ends with her back in the family's orbit, whether she is working a job apart from Félix, speaking to a social worker or trying to hide what is happening in her house. The film does an excellent job of selling her as a victim, and that is the cost: if every road leads back to the same place, the story is less a drama than a sentence being carried out.

The review also objects to a line it says stays with it, in which Martha tells someone that at some point they would have met someone like her. It accepts that the line may be true to life, and then argues that the film uses it only as the first layer of an origin story, with mental health touched on through arthouse technique and not through real contemplation. That is the sense of the review's remark that the film is devoid of autonomous agency.

Acting and directing: why both score a 5

The acting score rests on Schumacher and Ramon. Schumacher makes Martha pitiable without making her sympathetic in the usual way, and Ramon plays Félix as a convincing murderer. The review's phrase for the film's visual side is high close-up gore that makes it disturbingly intimate, and it credits Schmitt's gothic cinematography with much of that effect.

The directing score reflects Ouelhaj's control of tone. The film moves between social realism and surreal hallucination, including delusional self-speech and an incestuous embrace within the family, and the review says it does so with a coherent visual vocabulary. Whatever one thinks of the film's aims, the review makes clear that it is not a sloppy piece of work.

Megalomaniac explained: awards, release and where critics divide

Megalomaniac collected awards on the festival circuit, which complicates a simple reading of it as a failed film. It won Best Feature in the Cheval Noir competition at Fantasia, and Eye for Film reported the result on July 25, 2022. The jury called the film an astonishing, brutal piece of art that challenges the audience while simultaneously saying something deeply profound. Schumacher also received the competition's Outstanding Performance award. At Grimmfest, the jury gave the film its best cinematography award, and ScreenAnarchy's author, who sat on that jury, said the film was too dark and nasty to receive the others.

The two quotes point in opposite directions, and the gap is the interesting thing. A festival jury saw in Megalomaniac a work that says something deeply profound. The Rough Cut Review writer saw a work that fails to say anything beyond its own brutality. Grimmfest's preview called the film bold and expected a tough, divisive watch because of its violence and potentially triggering content. All three sources agree about the intensity. They disagree about whether intensity is enough.

For viewers in the United States, the film reached cinemas in a release handled by Dark Star Pictures, with a start date of September 8, 2023 reported by ScreenAnarchy. Availability on streaming and rental services changes, so check a current listing. Grimmfest listed the film with an 18 rating and warned that it contains images and sequences some viewers may find offensive or triggering.

The festival run

Fantasia is where the film first reached an audience, with its world premiere in July 2022 and the awards reported days later. Grimmfest followed, and its listing gave the film a UK premiere at the Odeon Great Northern on October 7, 2022, with a running time of 100 minutes and an 18 rating. The listing names Ouelhaj, Nicolas George and Florence Saâdi as producers and carries a warning that the film contains images and sequences that some viewers may find offensive or triggering.

That pattern, a genre festival premiere followed by a specialist release, is typical for arthouse horror. It also means the film arrived with a reputation attached. For a reader deciding whether to watch it, the awards say something about craft and nothing about enjoyment, and the festival materials are as frank about the content as the review is.

Verdict: should you watch Megalomaniac?

The Rough Cut Review score breaks the film into three parts. Writing gets a 2, acting a 5 and directing a 5, for a final score of 4. The review says the final mark is lower than the craft deserves because it cannot sit well with its conscience, and adds that the rest of the film is an absolute masterpiece. That is an unusual position for a review: the film is excellent at what it does, and the reviewer thinks what it does is a problem.

The review compares Megalomaniac to I Spit on Your Grave, the 1970s rape-revenge picture, and to Maniac, which shows murder from the killer's point of view. It adds that using sexual violence as a plot device is less shocking now than it was in the 1970s, so the choice reads as less justified. It also likens the film's visual excess to the superhero films of Zack Snyder: a visual sensation with little left to interpretation.

So who is it for? Viewers who value extreme arthouse horror and can tolerate sustained cruelty will find a film with a powerful lead performance, a distinct visual identity and festival credentials. Viewers who need a story to offer hope, a sense of choice or a moral frame will find the review's objection easy to share. Anyone with a personal history of sexual violence should treat the content warning as a real one.

A practical note on how to approach it: the film is slow in places, it is formally bold, and it makes no effort to soften what it shows. Viewers who go in expecting a conventional slasher will be surprised by its arthouse register, with hallucinations, doubles and symbolic imagery layered over the violence. Viewers who go in expecting a character study will find that Martha is the center of the film but that the film gives her little room to act. Knowing that ahead of time makes the experience more manageable, whatever the final opinion.

If you do choose to watch, treat it as the review suggests. It is a well-made film with a harsh worldview, and you do not have to like it to see why it won prizes.

The disagreement between the review and the festival juries is not a flaw in either. Juries reward ambition, craft and impact, and Megalomaniac has all three. A reviewer asks what a film does with that power, and the answer here is the point of contention. Readers can use that split as a guide: if the jury quotes sound like a film you want, the craft will deliver, and if the review's questions about agency and exploitation bother you, believe them.

Sources

• Megalomaniac, Grimmfest — Running time, language, cast, producers, UK premiere date, rating and content warning.
• Megalomaniac wins Cheval Noir, Eye for Film — Fantasia 2022 Best Feature and Outstanding Performance awards.
• Megalomaniac trailer news, ScreenAnarchy — Cinema release date and the Grimmfest cinematography award.