126 min | PG-13 | May 6, 2022 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Stephen Strange falls through the multiverse chasing a girl who can punch holes between worlds. Sam Raimi takes the controls of a Marvel machine and bolts a haunted house onto it. The seams show.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness drops Stephen Strange into a fight over America Chavez. She is a teenager who can tear holes between realities and cannot control the power. Strange protects her. Wanda Maximoff hunts her to steal that ability and reach a version of a life she lost. The film is really an experiment. It hands a Marvel tentpole to a horror director and watches what happens when the machine loosens its grip.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Strange as a man who has run out of certainty. He keeps the arrogance but loses the control that used to back it up. Elizabeth Olsen does the heaviest lifting. Her Wanda Maximoff carries the grief of a mother who has decided the universe owes her children back. Olsen plays the menace quietly and lets it curdle into something monstrous. Xochitl Gomez plays America Chavez with raw fear that keeps the cosmic stakes human.
Sam Raimi directs like he never left the horror genre. The camera lurches and tilts and chases its actors down corridors. He stages a duel fought with musical notes as projectiles and floods the back half with jump scares and body horror the franchise rarely permits. These are the choices of a filmmaker who treats the frame as a haunted house. Michael Waldron’s script cannot keep pace. It runs on exposition and exists to build doorways for other films, and the story thins out every time it stops to explain itself.
The result is a Marvel film at war with itself. Raimi’s instincts pull toward dread and invention. The franchise pulls toward setup and connective tissue. When the director wins, the movie crackles with a personality these films usually sand off. When the machine wins, it shrinks into another trailer for the next installment. The film is most alive when it forgets it has a job to do.