Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — The Horror Director Won

Marvel hired a horror director to fill a corporate slot, and for about forty glorious minutes the horror director wins.

Reed Richards is the smartest man in any universe, and he comes apart like a ball of yarn. Black Bolt opens his mouth to whisper and finds no mouth there; the scream has nowhere to go, so it turns around and goes inward, and his own skull settles the account. Captain Carter is bisected by her own shield. This is the Illuminati massacre at the center of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and it is the moment you know, down in your seat, that Sam Raimi did not tiptoe into the MCU wearing a visitor’s badge. He came through the front door, they handed him a superhero team built for no purpose except flattering the fanbase, and he spent five happy minutes slaughtering it with the invention of a man who has been waiting decades for someone to say yes.

He is back in superhero movies sixteen years after Spider-Man 3, and the question hanging over every frame going in was simple: would any of him survive? Marvel spent a decade and a half demonstrating that it could hire interesting directors and hand back interchangeable product. What happens here is stranger and a lot more fun. The process keeps the script. Raimi takes everything else. The crash zooms are his. The canted angles are his. The corpse humor, the giggle at the edge of the grave, is his. A finale in which Strange reanimates his own dead body and flies it into battle wearing a cloak of the damned belongs to no other filmmaker alive. The macabre keeps seeping up through the corporate polish like blood through a bandage, and watching for the next stain is the movie’s real suspense. Danny Elfman scores all of it in swooping gothic carnival brass, and no, none of it is subtle, and no, it was never supposed to be. Nobody should have hired these two men for restraint.

The boldest choice in the picture has nothing to do with where the camera sits. The film takes Wanda Maximoff, the closest thing this stretch of Marvel storytelling has had to a figure of pure sympathy, and makes her the monster. Elizabeth Olsen plays the turn not as corruption but as continuation: the same grief she carried through WandaVision, finally allowed to finish its sentence. Her Wanda is a mother whose love has no limiting principle, and Olsen holds both truths in the frame at once, often inside a single shot. Watch her eyes in the orchard scene. Watch the moment she tells Strange that this is what fairness looks like. The woman reaching for her children and the witch flattening everything between herself and them are not two characters swapping places. They are one person performing one action, and the horror is how short the distance turns out to be between devotion and destruction. It is the best acting anyone has done in a Doctor Strange movie, and it belongs to the villain.

Benedict Cumberbatch, to his credit, notices which movie he is in. His Strange is more weathered than the man from 2016, the arrogance still present but paying interest now, and the multiverse hands him a bleak little mirror: every variant of himself he meets has made the identical mistake, capability over connection, every time, in every world. Cumberbatch carries that discovery in his shoulders more than in his lines. It is quiet work inside a loud film, and it is the one thread of genuine self-examination the picture has.

Fairness demands the rest of the ledger, because the movie around all of this is a mess, and pretending otherwise would be an insult to it. The multiverse itself, the concept printed on the poster, is the least interesting thing on screen: a stack of realities flipped past like paint samples, none held long enough to mean anything, spectacle standing in where a reason to care should be. The script bends its characters’ motivations to reach the next set piece instead of letting the set pieces grow out of the people. And America Chavez, the teenager whose power drives the entire chase, is written as a battery with a backstory. Xochitl Gomez gives her the wary toughness of a kid who has stayed alive by running, and the film grants that performance maybe two scenes of actual character before reassigning her to plot duty. So when the ending comes, with America showing Wanda her own children flinching from her, the idea is right and the road to it was never built. The emotional logic is sound. The delivery is on credit.

Here is the thing, though. The MCU has put out a long shelf of movies more coherent than this one, and I would rewatch almost none of them before it. Fifteen years of franchise filmmaking have proven the studio can manufacture competence at scale. What it cannot manufacture is perversity: the specific pleasure of a director who finds beauty in the grotesque and comedy in the horrifying and cannot smother either instinct, not even with nine figures riding on his manners. Multiverse of Madness is not a great film. It is a compromised script wearing an uncompromised sensibility, and the sensibility wins enough rounds to make the fight worth the price of admission. In a run of movies that mostly could have been made by anyone, here is the one that could only have been made by Sam Raimi. That is not everything. It is also not nothing, and lately, around here, it is rare.