Evil Genius

Friday, September 18: This screening will be presented with open captions.

Chilling, fascinating, and darkly hilarious, Courteney Cox’s second feature as director boldly dramatizes the bizarre web of stories behind the infamous “pizza bomber” incident. Featuring lived-in lead performances from David Harbour (Stranger Things) and Oscar winner Patricia Arquette (Boyhood), Evil Genius is an astonishing true-crime story brimming with bloodshed, betrayals, and a hopeless case of amour fou.

Erie, Pennsylvania, 2003. From a phone booth outside a waffle joint, Bill Rothstein (Harbour) calls the police to report the corpse of a murdered man stashed in a freezer in the garage of Bill’s former paramour, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong (Arquette). But who is this murdered man? And exactly how did his body wind up in that freezer? 

To answer these questions — and raise many more — we backtrack several months to the day Marjorie threatened the entire staff of her local bank, which led Marjorie to plan a murder, which led Marjorie and Bill to devise a bank heist that would involve several of the duo’s seediest, drug-addled associates, require a pizza delivery man to pretend to be a bomb-carrying hostage — and prompt even more murders. 

Reminiscent of the Coen Brothers at their most cunningly funny, Evil Genius thrives on a strong sense of place and a killer cast of demented conspirators embodied by Michael Chernus, Garret Dillahunt, Danielle Macdonald, and Thomas Michael Allen. For all the stranger-than-fiction, psychopathic twists, the story’s greatest mystery might be the invincible affection of the wildly disturbed kind-of couple at the peak of this pyramid of ruin. 

Content advisory: extreme violence, drug use, coarse language, mature themes