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More an intense portrait of doomed romance than a serial-killer thriller, writer/director Patty Jenkins’s brutal biopic of prostitute-turned-multiple murderer Aileen Wuornos burrows deep into the woman’s psyche with the help of an Oscar-winning turn from Charlize Theron. While her physical transformation may have caught the Academy’s eye, Theron’s performance goes beyond the weight-gain and dental prosthetics, finding both compassion and coldness in Wuornos’s descent into homicidal mania. Aileen’s first kill is in self-defence, escaping from a “client”, but the impulse soon escalates into murder as she fights both to survive and to protect her burgeoning relationship with the naive outcast lesbian Selby (a superbly understated Christina Ricci). In other hands, this could have become overwrought melodrama, but Jenkins skilfully mines the humanity within the sensationalism to come up with something that is both tender and chilling — and ultimately heartbreaking.
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