Critics reviews

“Charlie Says” surpasses “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” in evoking the New Age fantasies and apocalyptic mentality of the late 1960s, partly because it plumbs the mind-set of Manson’s female followers.

Charlie Says does what Harron always does best: finds the three dimensions of women called “unstable” by the men around them.

When the flashback story ramps up to the murders, cutting back and forth to the imprisoned trio coming to grips (or not) with what they did, the filmmakers appear to be striving mightily for humanistic understanding, but the end result is far too jumbled to have the proper impact.

The unpretentious production values are matched by a sober style that favors the performances, particularly those of Hannah Murray, Merritt Wever, and in the flashiest role Matt Smith as Manson. In all, it’s a very worthy, unsensational effort to understand how naive idealism can be recruited by lunatic evil.

It may seem that there is little new left to say about Charles Manson, but Harron brings to this latest brush with historical notoriety a sense of the profound loss of self that was twinned with the unpardonable taking of life.