Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the MCU's most schizophrenic film, a production that cannot quite decide whether it is a Sam Raimi horror film wearing a Marvel costume or a Marvel film reluctantly allowing Sam Raimi to play in its sandbox. The tension between those two impulses produces something unlike anything else in the franchise: a film of vivid visual invention and genuine menace that is also narratively scrambled, emotionally inconsistent, and dependent on television viewing that a notable portion of its audience had not done.
At a Glance
Director: Sam Raimi
Runtime: 126 minutes
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Xochitl Gomez, Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Release: 2022
Critics Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, divisive)
Audience Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, thrilling in parts but frustrating as a whole)
Plot
Doctor Strange must protect America Chavez, a teenager with the ability to punch holes between universes, from a powerful enemy who wants to steal her power. The enemy is Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, who has been corrupted by the Darkhold and wants to use America's power to travel to a universe where her children exist. The Illuminati sequence is the film's most divisive element: a piece of fan service that Raimi dispatches with a gleeful brutality that is either the film's funniest joke or its most irresponsible moment, depending entirely on the viewer's investment in the characters involved. The ending is abrupt and emotionally unsatisfying, resolving Wanda's arc in a way that feels both sudden and unearned given the depth of grief the film has spent its runtime establishing.
Characters
Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff is the film's defining performance and its most notable achievement. Olsen plays the character's grief-fuelled villainy with a commitment and physical intensity that makes her frightening, and her work here is among the most powerful in the franchise's history even if the film around her does not fully deserve it. The problem is that her characterisation is entirely dependent on WandaVision, and viewers who have not seen the series will find her motivations opaque. Cumberbatch's Strange is a reliable and charismatic presence, but the film does not give him the room to make his arc feel consequential. Xochitl Gomez's America Chavez is likeable but underwritten, functioning primarily as a plot device. Patrick Stewart's return as Professor X is the most affecting of the Illuminati cameos, handled with a warmth and gravity that briefly suggests what the sequence might have been had Raimi not dispatched it with such relish.
Meaning / Themes
The film gestures towards themes of grief, obsession, and the danger of prioritising what we want over what is right, but it does not develop them with sufficient consistency. Wanda's arc is the most interesting expression of these themes, but it is undermined by the curtness of her conclusion. Strange's own arc, about accepting the consequences of his choices, is more coherently handled but less dramatically compelling, and the film's dependence on WandaVision for its emotional foundation is its most damaging structural weakness.
Direction
Raimi's direction is the film's most consistently strong element, a disciplined exercise in genre filmmaking that demonstrates why he remains one of Hollywood's most distinctive visual stylists. The unsettling sequences are frightening, the action is fluid and spatially coherent, and the film's visual imagination is remarkable throughout. Danny Elfman's score is one of the MCU's most characterful, drawing on his background in darker material to create something that suits the film's tonal ambitions far better than a more conventional MCU score would have.
Raimi's genre sensibility is the film's greatest strength and its most polarising quality. The sequences in which Wanda hunts Strange and America through the multiverse have a dread and a visual energy the franchise had never previously achieved, and they represent some of the most purely cinematic moments in the MCU's history. The problem is that this register sits uneasily with the film's more conventional elements, and the tonal whiplash between Raimi's darker sequences and the franchise's characteristic wit is occasionally jarring in ways that prevent the film from achieving the coherence its ambitions require.
Multiverse of Madness received mixed reviews on its release and was a major commercial success. Critics were divided between those who celebrated Raimi's approach and Olsen's performance and those who found the film structurally incoherent and emotionally unsatisfying. The Illuminati sequence generated considerable online debate, with reactions ranging from delight at the fan service to frustration at the characters' summary disposal. It is now regarded as one of the MCU's most contested entries, a film that is simultaneously one of the franchise's most visually ambitious and one of its most compromised in narrative terms. Its reliance on WandaVision is consistently cited as a barrier to its effectiveness as a standalone film; audiences who skipped the series found the emotional stakes largely inaccessible.
Final Verdict: A gloriously uneven film that is more interesting than most of the MCU's more polished entries. Raimi brings a visual invention and a genre sensibility the franchise had never previously attempted, Olsen is remarkable, and the film has a dread and an oddness that distinguishes it from everything around it. But the plot is thin, the ending is abrupt, and the dependence on WandaVision is a real obstacle. Fascinating rather than fully satisfying.