Wicked 1998

When she's bad, she's horrid... and she's just about always bad.

Wicked is a 1998 movie directed by Michael Steinberg, starring Julia Stiles, Louise Myrback, and William R. Moses. It's a murder mystery that gradually Genre Shifts into a dark psychodrama dealing with family secrets and unwholesome relationships. While the focus sometimes drifts to other characters, the movie centers principally around Ellie Christianson, a temperamental 14-year-old girl who lives with her father Ben, her mother Karen, and her younger sister Inger.

Ellie has a very close relationship with her father... perhaps too close. When someone brutally bludgeons her mother to death, she develops a rather unwholesome attraction to him that is not entirely unrequited. Meanwhile, one Detective Boland comes sniffing around for clues to try to find Mrs. Christianson's murderer, investigating several potential suspects including Ellie, Ben, and their rather sleazy neighbor Lawson Smith, who was having an affair with Karen and is now developing a similarly unwholesome (and also not entirely unrequited) interest in Ellie.

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The film provides examples of:

• Alcohol Induced Idiocy: It's when he comes home a bit tipsy from his drinking that Ellie makes an (apparently successful) attempt to seduce her father.
• Asshole Victim: Karen Christianson didn't exactly endear herself to any of her potential murderers by committing adultery with her neighbor, firing her maid on suspicion that her husband was having an adulterous affair with her, and threatening to divorce her husband and take custody of their children after she kicks him out of the house.
  • Also, whether guilty of murdering Karen or not, Ellie is not an especially sympathetic murder victim after seducing both her father and her neighbor, and few are likely to mourn Lawson's death after he got tangled up in an adulterous affair with both Karen and her daughter Ellie.
• Book Ends: A pair of Greek Comedy and Tragedy masks on display in the family's house serve as this symbolically for the movie. The Tragedy mask goes missing after it was used to murder Karen, and Ellie later finds it. The Comedy mask goes missing after it's later used to murder Ellie, and Lena later finds it.
• Daddy's Girl: Ben brings home a makeup kit for Ellie and privately confesses to her at one point that she's his favorite daughter, and she in turn adores him and keeps putting off her plans to run away from home because she doesn't want to leave him. By the end, when Ellie's out of the way, Inger is apparently determined to take her sister's place in this role as well.
• Dysfunctional Family: The Christiansons, certainly, with all the adulterous affair(s) and alienated affections between the spouses and the their children's misbehavior; and also the Smiths with Lawson's wife abandoning him and taking his son and half of his earthly possessions with her in a moving truck.
• Enfant Terrible: Ellie, since she's 14.
  • Also, Inger, who's 12, at the end.
• Fille Fatale: Woe to anyone who gets in Ellie's way.
  • And again, woe to anyone who gets in Inger's way once she decides to take Ellie's place.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Zig Zagged. Whether Ellie is her mother's murderer or not, Inger is definitely indicated to be Ellie's murderer at the end, and it's strongly implied she was looking to take her sister's place with her father just as Ellie was looking to take her mother's. Whether or not Lawson was Karen's murderer, he ends up dead for having a torrid affair with Ellie. As for Lena Anderson, she's a Karma Houdini if she committed the murder, but she probably won't be for much longer if she continues to be in Inger's way; and if she didn't do it, Inger is still likely to put her out of the way one way or another. Meanwhile, Inger herself is a Karma Houdini for so long as the authorities don't find out she murdered her sister (which they won't unless Lena can find some way to prove she did).
• Henpecked Husband: Also a henpecked father. Though he argues rather belligerently with his wife before she's murdered, Ben Christianson is shown on the whole to be a weak-willed workaholic who caves in easily to his wife and daughters' demands; this is one of the ways we in the audience know he's not the murderer even before Boland and the police clear him of suspicion.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: Ellie is shown to be wearing her late mother's wedding ring when bludgeoned to death the same way she was, symbolizing where her ambition to take her mother's place has gotten her.
• Parental Incest: Ellie and her father are heavily implied to have done something they really shouldn't have, and Inger is heavily impled to be planning on taking her sister's place with their weak-willed father by the end.
• The Unsolved Mystery: Did Ellie kill her mother out of a desire to take her place? Did Smith Lawson do it because Karen refused to run away with him? Might the maid Lena Anderson have committed the murder as revenge for Mrs. Christianson's firing her? Also, was Lena having an affair with Mr. Christianson as his wife suspected, or did they merely develop their romance suspiciously quickly after she was murdered? Was it Ellie or Lena's perspective from which we were seeing the scene that established Karen was in an adulterous affair with Lawson?
• The Untwist: In-Universe, when Boland figures he's finally caught his culprit, his partner reminds him that Lawson was his first hunch. Has he really caught his culprit, however? (If not, consider this trope subverted.)
• Who Murdered The Asshole?: While not the main plot, who murdered Karen is definitely an important subplot, especially to Detective Boland.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: While Boland is very much the kind of detective with the experience and skills to solve a murder mystery, he'd be much better suited to an Always Murder series, as his hunt for the murderer has him focusing mainly on Ben Christianson's alienation from his wife (and possible affair with the maid) and Lawson Smith's adulterous affair with her while completely failing to notice Ellie's development of an Electra Complex toward her father.
• Your Cheating Heart: Karen is shown to have been in an adulterous affair with Lawson, and Lawson's wife is heavily implied to have suspected this of him all along when she walked out on him and took their young son with her, though the son claims the reason they're leaving is because his father "isn't able to pay the bills anymore."