It was July 6th of 1993 when Karla Homolka was convicted on two counts of manslaughter for her involvement in Paul Bernardo’s spree of abduction, rape, torture, and, eventually, three murders. Bernardo himself landed charges for two counts of kidnapping, unlawful confinement, aggravated sexual assault, and first-degree murder, including the unlawful dismemberment of a corpse. The question of Bernardo’s monstrousness is not even a question. The monster in Karla is there, only it took everyone, particularly the Canadian legal system, too long to see it. She made what many in the news media dubbed a ‘deal with the Devil’ in order to get her conviction because the police only had her story as evidence at the time. Through a series of events, videotapes Bernardo made of himself torturing the girls came out as evidence, depicting Karla’s active role in the rapes and more than likely involvement in the murders themselves— this revelation came only after Homolka’s guilty plea bargain. She received twelve years for manslaughter, and Bernardo was given life in prison without parole for twenty-five years for the two murder charges.
Bernardo was recently eligible for parole in February 2018 which was later denied in October. He will more than surely die in jail. Karla is married again with children and lives happily in Québec. The mishandling of the case against Homolka is one of the many lasting blights on the justice system in Canada. The 2006 film Karla’s plot involves Homolka (played by Orange is the New Black’s Laura Prepon) in a session with a psychologist determining her parole eligibility. The screenplay moves between Karla’s version of events and the events themselves, showing the tortured life she lived as an abused wife and accomplice to her husband’s crimes. But the screenplay fails to do the real case any justice, focused on all the wrong aspects of the real case. Prepon plays Homolka well enough, and Mischa Barton gives a chilling turn as Bernardo.
Karla’s portrayed as a victim throughout the film. She’s always reluctant and never the aggressor. It’s obvious at many points she would have been able to stop what she was doing, and what she was enabling Paul to do, yet the way she’s written as a character along with the way Prepon portrays her conveys the idea she was, first and foremost, a victim. The screenplay does at least one smart thing initially by beginning the story of her relationship with Bernardo by depicting exactly how much she knew going into their marriage, which is in actuality a blow to Homolka’s claims of battered wife syndrome. We see Karla as a woman who had a choice at one point, before the worst of their relationship started, and chose only herself. She wanted love so badly she was willing to sacrifice everything, even her own family. Before she married Bernardo, she was worried because he didn’t like that she had sexual partners before him and had an eerie obsession with virginity. This prompted her to give him a Christmas gift one year: her virgin sister Tammy. On December 24th, 1990, Paul and Karla laced alcoholic drinks with animal sedatives then fed them to fifteen-year-old Tammy. Once the young girl was unconscious Paul proceeded to rape her while videotaping the ordeal and including Karla in the sexual action. After a short time the little sister choked on her own vomit, and it wasn’t long before she died. The death was later ruled an accident. Karla still married Paul the following year knowing full well what the two of them had done to her sister. Rather than a battered woman becoming a battered wife only to become an accomplice to rape and murder via violent coercion and fear, Karla was Paul’s partner in crime from early on who, despite being abused later, went into marriage proudly with a horrific bond already connecting them.
The biggest problem in the screenplay is its treatment of the infamous videotapes in terms of how Karla’s shown taking part in them. Bernardo filmed much of the rape and torture he perpetrated against the poor girls who were unfortunate enough to cross his path. He gave the tapes over to his original defence lawyer, Ken Murray, who withheld them nearly a year and a half before turning them over to the Crown. Once the tapes were revealed, they gave law enforcement and the court a better idea of Karla’s involvement in Bernardo’s crimes, and it’s generally taken as a given that, were the tapes presented as evidence before Homolka took a guilty plea bargain, she would have been convicted for murder right alongside her husband. 
Many who know the case will also point out that, as the Scarborough Rapist, Bernardo had never tried to kill any of his victims and showed no apparent signs of escalation— he was such a narcissist, especially as time went on and he evaded capture longer, that he believed himself untouchable by the law. Strangely the film’s screenplay is intent on portraying Karla as wholly reluctant to engage in Paul’s violent sex games with the girls they kidnapped. There are scenes where the audience will expect a point to be made about Karla’s disarming presence to these girls as the wife, then she becomes just another actor in Paul’s movies. One disturbing scene features Karla preparing a victim for murder, yet it’s portrayed as a decision full of guilt and not a cold blooded, calculated killing to prevent a girl who’s seen their faces from reporting them to the police.
If anything, Karla, warts and all, depicts the soullessness of two outwardly beautiful people, whose Ken and Barbie looks created the facade of something more interesting behind it, except Karla and Paul were painfully ordinary aside from the fact they committed vicious crimes. The screenplay leans too far in a morally questionable direction in its depiction of Karla as a victim. It never strays into exploitative content: the rape and torture of the victims is heavily suggested, never shown outright, and the worst of the couple’s brutality is only ever alluded to without needing the viewer to witness it in full. This doesn’t change the fact Karla’s representation in the screenplay becomes part of the problem. 
People saw Karla as a victim, often because of how the defence team dressed her as an innocent school girl-like personality, playing up her Barbie looks. She employed the defence of being a battered woman forced to follow her husband’s murderous and violently sexual whims, which was only half of the truth. She treated rape and murder as simply being what she calls “sidetracked” in their relationship. Her use of victimhood betrays the 99.999% of battered women out there who do not kill other women with their abusive husband. Homolka may never have killed anyone if she hadn’t met Bernardo, but that also doesn’t mean she was a helpless victim, either. Karla’s screenplay skirts along the edges of whether the eponymous woman was actually a victim when it ought to have more deeply confronted the evidence she was her husband’s accomplice. There are podcasts out there which explore Homolka and Bernardo’s vicious marriage far better than this film, and, above all, with a better conscience and sense of morality.
