Movie Review : No Man of God (2021)

Oct 12

Oct 12 Movie Review : No Man of God (2021)

Ted Bundy died on the electric chair on January 24, 189, but the idea of Ted Bundy didn’t. That’s when the power dynamics with collective consciousness changed and we started turning his memory into whatever we wanted. Serial killers tend to be romanticized and misinterpreted by nature, but there is perhaps no serial killer more misinterpreted than Bundy in popular culture. Because he WAS different from the others.

That is why we keep featuring him in movies like No Man of God, who romanticize and misinterpret him for our entertainment. That is Ted Bundy’s own personal hell. He belongs to us now and there’s nothing he can do about it.

What makes No Man of God different from the other Ted Bundy movies is that it’s entire set during his incarceration. No one dies on camera. No one dies off camera either, at least not in real time. It’s the story of his relationship to early days FBI Profiler Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood) and how he somewhat redeemed his soul by hanging out with a devout Christian and helping the American justice system better understand men like him.

The Romance of Ted Bundy

On a technical level, No Man of God is a solid movie. Almost entirely shot in a claustrophobic prison interrogation room, director Amber Sealey makes great use of the cramped setting and her two lead actors’ dynamic interpretation of Kit Lesser’s screenplay to constantly ratchet up tension. But the entire credibility of No Man of God lies on one kind-of-disproven factor: that Ted Bundy was a sexy evil genius. He was not.

It’s funny, because the movie addresses the mythologization of Ted Bundy to a certain degree. At some point, the characters talk about how he used wrongful perception on him to evade police. But otherwise No Man of God presents Bundy as an extremely smart, attractive and manipulative man who used information control in order to dictate how people perceive him. This is only half true.

If you haven’t already, watch the 2019 documentary miniseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. It’s a collection of interviews with the man himself and various testimonies from people who knew him outside of a prison setting. Everyone knew from a young age there was something wrong with him. Although he was smart and organized, he used playbook tricks not to get caught, like putting physical distance between his kills.

He got caught anyway.

Why does it matter? Because No Man of God is based on a disproven perception of Ted Bundy, therefore making a complete fiction loosely based on someone who existed. There is a particularly cringey scene at the end where Bundy recalls a murder in front of Hagmaier where he seems to infect him with his evilness of whatever, which reveals the true intent of No Man of God. This is a Christian movie.

Evil-as-a-force

Why is it important that No Man of God is a religious movie? It matters in the sense that he isn’t the protagonist of the movie: FBI profiler Bill Hagmaier is. I don’t know if real life Bill Hagmaier (because he is a very real person) is religious at all, but his fictitious self is. The first thing you see him do in No Man of God is kneel on his bedside and pray and it’s not nearly the last time his religiosity is overtly expressed.

That makes Ted Bundy an accessory to this movie. An accessory to what exactly? This is the mystery No Man of God isn’t able to solve. Is he an accessory to Bill’s career? Not really, because there’s no real explanation to what Bill is doing in the movie. No method to speak of. They just talk as the execution date comes closer and closer, until Ted spills his guts about the women he kills. Confessions kind of just happen.

Is Ted the accessory to the will of God? Is it what Bill is? This is what is so difficult to understand about No Man of God. It never settles on whether evil is something a person is or evil is a force. It humanizes Ted Bundy in certain conversations and makes him look like a man possessed by Satan himself in others. It’s never clear whether the movie is trying to redeem him or condemn him in a Christian perspective.

You just know that God is watching.

Should you watch No Man of God? I guess. It’s not dumb or poorly made. It just seems like it has no idea whatsoever what to say about its own topic. It’s utterly fascinated with Ted Bundy and yet it doesn’t understand it at all. It just speculates endlessly about who he is and why he does what he does and you can’t really blame it for that. Because it’s what we all do when we think about Ted Bundy.