The movie has its moments but it's a blinding mess all together. Although the film brings a clearcut finale rather than a vague puzzle, too many loose threads come together too neatly and rather than bringing the film to a satisfactory conclusion, it leaves you scratching your head, is this what I spent the last 2 hours waiting to hear? Overall, there is too much plot, too little character development and a wildly uneven tone. Other problems: De Palma uses the lesbian angle of the movie (never a part of the case) to full exploitative advantage, and the actresses seem unable to master to the expressive 1940s style acting that would have come naturally to even a marginal 40s star. Hitchcock or even Lynch could have shot the same scene, with the same events and dialogue, and made it menacing and creepy, which it needed to be to function in the mystery. The problem is that the scene is valuable to the plot and should never have been played for laughs. A dinner scene between a suspect and her family had the crowd in stitches (the only scene during which the audience laughed). The tone is never consistently campy, but when the camp arrives it overwhelms the story. A key plot point and character motivator is the fascination of the two detectives with the murder, but this is never elaborated enough in the film, and we're left to half-heartedly guess at the character motivations. So much plot and character and sideplots and backstory are built around the central characters that the case itself seems like a distraction. But the main problem here is not the lack of factual detail, so much as the confusion of plot that surrounds and overwhelms the Black Dahlia case itself.

1 Originally published in 2013 in French 2 as Le Dahlia Noir, it was published in English in June 2016, by Archaia Entertainment, a division of Boom Studios. Of course, I knew that it was a fictionalization of the case, but I had no idea the movie would present its own evidence and draw its own conclusions. The Black Dahlia: A Crime Graphic Novel is a graphic novel adaptation of James Ellroy s novel The Black Dahlia, by Alexis Nolent and David Fincher, and illustrated by Miles Hyman. Anybody expecting to get a great account of the Black Dahlia case, even fictional, will be disappointed going in to this movie.

The black dahlia ellroy