The Trouble with Karla

Under scrutiny: Karla Homolka (Laura Prepon) undergoes a parole evaluation in Joel Bender’s Karla. Courtesy Christal Films.

When Paul’s Case, Lynn Crosbie’s brilliant fictional treatment of the lives of killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, was first published, there was considerable debate about the book’s merits. More generally, there were debates about whether or not art should — or even could — be made about such heinous crimes. The independent bookstore I worked in at the time refused to display the book, despite having a true crime section that swelled with non-fiction accounts of the case.

Some of the questions raised amid the release of the new drama Karla are: what about the rights of the victims’ families? Is any artwork necessary enough to re-open wounds that might not have healed? Are artists profiting from the grief of others? And should we allow them to do so?

I would argue that these questions have less to do with the rights of the victims’ families than with our own conflicted belief in the power of art. There may be temporary media bans during a trial to protect a jury, but there are no checks on newspapers reporting on the same crimes. There are no restrictions on true-crime books. And yet in August, the Montreal World Film Festival withdrew Karla from its programming. (It was rumoured that a major sponsor had exerted pressure on festival organizers to do so.) Which only proves that when fiction reveals truths only hinted at by the facts, people get antsy, unnerved, confused.

The facts of Paul Bernardo and Homolka’s criminality are well known to most Canadians; Karla describes them both mechanically and methodically.

The story is recounted by Homolka (played by Laura Prepon) while she undergoes a parole evaluation in Saskatchewan. It’s a convenient, hackneyed framing device, and the effect is vaguely contradictory — it establishes Homolka as an unreliable narrator, but also guarantees that the film is seen completely through her eyes. (The film opens and closes, in fact, with a close-up on Prepon’s baby blues.)

Harrowing circumstances: Homolka and husband Paul Bernardo (Misha Collins). Courtesy Christal Films.

Homolka is a teenaged veterinary assistant in St. Catharines, Ont., when she meets Bernardo (played by 24’s Misha Collins), a handsome, dissolute aspiring rapper. The two fall in love and marry. By that time, Bernardo, possessed of a voracious, predatory sexual appetite, was raping women on his routine forays to the Toronto suburbs. Before long, Bernardo enlists Homolka in his crimes and she goes along, without undue coercion. One of their first victims is Homolka’s younger sister, whom they accidentally murder in a botched rape attempt. The way in which subsequent teenage victims are abducted, abused and killed, however, is more deliberately callous. (The real names of the victims, Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, have been changed in the film, one of the few deviations from the public record.)

Although Bernardo beats her savagely, Homolka refuses to leave him. Was it out of misplaced affection? Fear? The Stockholm Syndrome? Karla doesn’t say. Bernardo chronicles their crimes compulsively on videotape, the transcripts of which serve as damning evidence once the couple is caught, arrested and tried. Homolka plea-bargains, thus betraying her husband, and is given a highly controversial reduced sentence.

Critics took Crosbie’s book to task for portraying Homolka and Bernardo as complex human beings, for trying to represent their crimes as emblematic of a greater societal malaise. In Karla, Homolka and Bernardo seem barely human at all. That said, neither are convincing as monsters, either. Collins’s Bernardo is a snarling cipher whose eventual breakdown is indicated largely by an increasingly frightening haircut. While Prepon captures Homolka’s alternately coquettish and dispassionate personality, the actor provides no evidence of Homolka’s inner life. The film adds little to our knowledge of the couple or why they were compelled to commit such violence. Karla adheres strictly to the facts (much of the script was lifted from court transcripts), but it rarely dares to suppose anything beyond them. In Paul’s Case, Crosbie describes Homolka as “a blond starlet in a Senecan drama.” In Karla, the titular murderess is played by a starlet of sorts; the drama that unfolds, however, is much closer to late-night A&E than Roman tragedy.

For all of the controversy surrounding Karla’s release, the film is surprisingly timid, almost benign. There is no nudity, and aside from Homolka's incessant beatings, much of the film's violence takes place off-camera. The caution likely stems from the filmmakers’ respect for the victims’ families (and the restrictions of Canadian child porn laws), but it’s more significantly a failure of cinematic ability. Bender is no Atom Egoyan, and the film’s generic, made-for-TV sheen reduces the genuine trauma an audience should feel. Menace is suggested by slow-motion photography, hasty camerawork and a trite musical score — techniques that only cheapen the violence. Add to that the film’s poor production values — nondescript sets, performances that range from inept to histrionic, zero sense of place — and Karla becomes more ridiculous than revolting.

While an accurate representation of the case would be impossible to bear — it would simply be a snuff film — stripping the crimes of their nightmarish quality makes them almost tolerable. Karla should be an experience that makes you scream, that makes you cry, that makes you squirm, that makes you angry. Instead, it makes you shrug. The banality of evil has rarely looked so banal.

Karla opens Jan. 20 across Canada.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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