The scale of expectation that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness arrived with was, by any reasonable measure, unmanageable. Four years of Phase Four Disney+ programming had been positioning the multiverse as the MCU's next organizational principle, and the film's title promised the payoff of that positioning. Fan theories had been circulating for months about which variants and legacy characters would appear, fueled by trailer footage that suggested a scale of crossover ambition the franchise had not attempted since Avengers: Endgame. Into that expectation walked Sam Raimi, whose relationship with the material is closer to that of a horror director given unusual latitude than to a franchise custodian executing a plan, and the film that emerged is considerably more personal and considerably more strange than most of that expectation could accommodate.
At its core, this is a movie about grief. Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) wants her children back, and the lengths she will go to in pursuit of that want are the film's central dramatic engine. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) encounters America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teenager with the ability to punch through the multiverse, and has to protect her from a threat that the film's marketing worked carefully to obscure. Rachel McAdams returns as Christine Palmer, and Benedict Wong as Wong. The second-act ensemble of characters the film brings together for a brief and eventful sequence are best encountered without prior knowledge.
Raimi's directorial presence is the film's most significant quality and the source of both its pleasures and its divisiveness. This is a horror film that happens to be an MCU entry, not an MCU entry that happens to have horror elements, and the distinction matters. The camera movements, the lighting choices, the specific way violence is staged and consequences are shown: these are the decisions of a filmmaker who made Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell and who understands how to build dread through formal means rather than content alone. A sequence in which Wanda pursues her targets through a facility is staged with the cold precision of a slasher film and is among the most genuinely unsettling sequences the franchise has produced in any format.
Olsen is doing her finest MCU work. The film takes seriously the emotional logic of what WandaVision established about Wanda's grief and follows it to conclusions that are not comfortable, and Olsen locates the character's specific tragedy, a person who has been shaped by loss and who has found a justification that makes further violence feel like love rather than violence, with a precision that makes the film's most difficult scenes feel necessary rather than exploitative. The prior Disney+ series enrich the experience but, as promised by the film's own exposition, do not require prior viewing to follow the plot.
Gomez's America Chavez is the most promising MCU introduction the Phase Four properties have produced, and the film earns the post-credits setup for her to be an integral force in future appearances. The multiverse sequences are visually inventive in ways that the CGI-heavy productions of this era rarely achieve, suggesting worlds with potentially different internal logic rather than simply different color grades applied to familiar environments.
The film's weaknesses are primarily structural: the exposition requirements of a multiverse story produce some passages where the plot machinery is visible, and the second act's most significant sequence arrives and departs quickly enough that its full emotional weight is compressed rather than fully felt. These are complaints about the scaffolding of a film whose creative ambitions are realized more completely than most Phase Four entries managed.
