‘Evil Genius’ Review: Patricia Arquette and David Harbour Take on a Horrifying True Crime Story

Although her persona as an actor will forever be entwined with a certain ‘90s sitcom, behind the camera Courteney Cox has a bit of a mean streak. “Evil Genius,” her third full-length film as a director, combines elements of the first two: Like the 2012 TV movie “TalhotBlond,” it’s based on a notorious true-crime case, and borrows its name from a documentary about those same events. Like 2014’s “Just Before I Go,” it attempts to pull off the difficult task of making death and mental illness funny. And like that film, it fails miserably at it.

In this case, “Evil Genius” shares its title with a 2018 Netflix documentary series that detailed the bizarre and complicated series of events that led to pizza delivery driver Brian Wells kneeling on the ground outside of a PNC bank branch in Erie, Pennsylvania, informing the police officers surrounding him that he had a bomb strapped to his neck. That series began by detailing the specifics of the heist plot — which included a sadistic scavenger hunt Wells was supposed to complete in order to defuse the device — before working backwards to its ringleader, a woman named Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.

Cox takes the opposite approach, emphasizing the characters and their relationships over the robbery itself. In fact, it’s not even the most important felony in the film: That would be the murder of Marjorie’s boyfriend, who first appears as a body in a freezer belonging to Marjorie’s ex and co-conspirator Bill Rothstein (David Harbour). Bill believes that Marjorie (Patricia Arquette) is his soulmate, and has remained faithfully by her side for decades, long after she left him with a lipstick message on their mirror when they lived together as young adults.

Cox’s film is biased in Bill’s favor, portraying him as a lapdog whose love for this screeching, spiteful, beady-eyed woman is his great tragic flaw. Arquette’s one-note performance makes it difficult to understand why this is the case, and Harbour’s passivity does little to add interest to the character.

Early scenes of the two as teenagers, featuring Arquette’s daughter Harlow Jane as a younger version of Marjorie, do help explain what brought Bill and Marjorie together in the first place. But Cox seems uninterested in understanding how the bright teenager revealed in flashbacks became the angry and resentful adult we see here, instead reveling both in the grisly details of the crime and in Arquette’s overwrought caricature of a woman who is clearly mentally unwell.

Another crucial difference between the two “Evil Geniuses” is that when the docuseries called Diehl-Armstrong a genius, it meant it, in its own sensational true-crime kind of way. Here, the moniker is entirely sarcastic: Marjorie and Bill are consistently portrayed as emotionally immature fools whose intelligence is entirely relative to that of the other fuckups in their dying industrial town, a wretched gang of stooges and fall guys played by Michael Chernus, Garret Dillahunt, Danielle Macdonald, and Thomas Michael Allen.

Macdonald’s Justine is particularly pitiable, a sex worker who’s drawn into the conspiracy against her will and literally dumped onto a street corner when she’s no longer of use. Marjorie is full of hissing bile toward the woman, as she is toward everyone, and much of “Evil Genius” consists of Arquette in prosthetic makeup and a stringy wig lashing out at the world. Cox appears to be going for the type of bumbling-criminal farce perfected by Joel and Ethan Coen, with shades of the small-town nihilism of Sam Raimi’s “A Simple Plan.” But there’s one key difference: Those movies are mean and funny, while this one is just mean.

Everything is misjudged here, from the comic sans variant on handwritten script in the opening titles to the loud, jarring needle drops to that putty-faced prosthetic. The contempt this film has for its characters is especially distasteful when you think about the larger context: Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong — who died in prison in 2017 — was not a nice or good person, to be clear. But to have two famous and influential women with ties to the same multi-generational acting family (Cox and Arquette were sisters-in-law from 1999 to 2013) make a movie dedicated to playing the squalid living conditions and mental-health issues of a bunch of Rust Belt outcasts for laughs just feels unnecessarily cruel.

One of the things “Evil Genius” comes down on Marjorie hardest about is her tendency to see other people as beneath her. And yes, this does lead her to develop a shocking indifference toward human life. No one is defending that. But there’s an irony here, in that the movie then punches down on Marjorie and her co-conspirators in turn. If Cox is aware of this fraught dynamic, it doesn’t show up on the screen, suggesting that maybe the people making the movie haven’t thought this through as well as they thought they did.

Grade: D+

“Evil Genius” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.