Psycho Killer
On paper, there were plenty of reasons for this to work: Georgina Campbell in the lead, an especially disturbing serial killer and Andrew Kevin Walker, the writer of Se7en, behind the screenplay. At first it even "smelled" promising. The problem is that Psycho Killer ultimately seems more interested in the brutality and strangeness of its villain than in building genuinely strong tension around him.
The killer is unpleasant, which I assume is exactly the intention. He is not given the elegant charisma of other cinematic psychopaths, nor the kind of magnetism that makes viewers uncomfortable because they find themselves fascinated by him. What dominates here is repulsion. His rituals, his relationship with violence and the coldness with which he moves through the world make him feel morally contaminated, someone you would want kept as far away as possible.
That should make him terrifying, yet the film makes the same mistake as many violent thrillers: the more it demonstrates what he is capable of, the less impact each new demonstration has. Violence accumulates until it reaches a point where it no longer increases tension and simply confirms something we already know. Horror loses force when surprise is replaced by insistence.
Georgina Campbell holds up the other half of the film reasonably well. She has a natural quality that helps the investigation retain some humanity even when the story begins drifting away from anything remotely recognizable. After Barbarian, she had already shown how effective she can be in stories where fear and strangeness constantly change shape, and here she once again provides a credibility that the screenplay does not always return.
The film also has a problem with tone. It begins as a dark pursuit thriller, but gradually introduces such grotesque elements and such exaggerated situations that it becomes difficult to know exactly what it wants to be. That could have been an advantage if Gavin Polone had completely embraced the madness, but there is a strange hesitation: it wants to feel sick and excessive without ever fully surrendering to delirium.
Andrew Kevin Walker leaves behind a few ideas that inevitably recall his fascination with morally deformed characters and worlds where violence seems to obey its own logic, but the precision that made Se7en work is missing here. In that film, every element strengthened the atmosphere and its worldview. In Psycho Killer, potentially unsettling pieces appear without always forming an equally unsettling whole.
Malcolm McDowell brings an immediate sense of strangeness simply by being present. He is one of those actors who carries decades of dark cinema with him and whose face alone creates certain expectations. The problem is that the film sometimes seems more interested in accumulating oddities and recognizable names than in properly developing the ideas it introduces.
Visually, I also struggle to find a particularly distinctive personality. There are effective moments and a few compositions that reinforce the feeling of hostile territory and a journey toward something increasingly diseased, but it is difficult to identify a strong visual identity. That is curious in a film whose title and premise practically demand something more ferocious.
The music interested me more. Some passages have an industrial, uncomfortable texture, almost as if Trent Reznor were hovering nearby, and that kind of sound creates a sense of paranoia and grime that works better than some of the more explicit imagery. In those moments, the film seems to understand that discomfort is more effective when it seeps in gradually than when blood is simply thrown at the screen.
What ultimately remains is a strange feeling. I would not say I was bored: there is enough movement, violence and bizarre material to keep the ninety-minute running time moving. But the brutality never comes to mean very much. The killer is repulsive, Georgina Campbell works well and the atmosphere occasionally lands, yet beneath all the excess I found less substance than I expected.
Perhaps that is the biggest problem: a film written by the screenwriter of Se7en and called Psycho Killer should leave a much deeper mark. This one leaves behind unpleasant images, a lingering sense of unease and a handful of curious ideas, but not much more. Strange, dirty and occasionally effective, yet too uneven for its madness to become truly memorable.
The killer is unpleasant, which I assume is exactly the intention. He is not given the elegant charisma of other cinematic psychopaths, nor the kind of magnetism that makes viewers uncomfortable because they find themselves fascinated by him. What dominates here is repulsion. His rituals, his relationship with violence and the coldness with which he moves through the world make him feel morally contaminated, someone you would want kept as far away as possible.
That should make him terrifying, yet the film makes the same mistake as many violent thrillers: the more it demonstrates what he is capable of, the less impact each new demonstration has. Violence accumulates until it reaches a point where it no longer increases tension and simply confirms something we already know. Horror loses force when surprise is replaced by insistence.
Georgina Campbell holds up the other half of the film reasonably well. She has a natural quality that helps the investigation retain some humanity even when the story begins drifting away from anything remotely recognizable. After Barbarian, she had already shown how effective she can be in stories where fear and strangeness constantly change shape, and here she once again provides a credibility that the screenplay does not always return.
The film also has a problem with tone. It begins as a dark pursuit thriller, but gradually introduces such grotesque elements and such exaggerated situations that it becomes difficult to know exactly what it wants to be. That could have been an advantage if Gavin Polone had completely embraced the madness, but there is a strange hesitation: it wants to feel sick and excessive without ever fully surrendering to delirium.
Andrew Kevin Walker leaves behind a few ideas that inevitably recall his fascination with morally deformed characters and worlds where violence seems to obey its own logic, but the precision that made Se7en work is missing here. In that film, every element strengthened the atmosphere and its worldview. In Psycho Killer, potentially unsettling pieces appear without always forming an equally unsettling whole.
Malcolm McDowell brings an immediate sense of strangeness simply by being present. He is one of those actors who carries decades of dark cinema with him and whose face alone creates certain expectations. The problem is that the film sometimes seems more interested in accumulating oddities and recognizable names than in properly developing the ideas it introduces.
Visually, I also struggle to find a particularly distinctive personality. There are effective moments and a few compositions that reinforce the feeling of hostile territory and a journey toward something increasingly diseased, but it is difficult to identify a strong visual identity. That is curious in a film whose title and premise practically demand something more ferocious.
The music interested me more. Some passages have an industrial, uncomfortable texture, almost as if Trent Reznor were hovering nearby, and that kind of sound creates a sense of paranoia and grime that works better than some of the more explicit imagery. In those moments, the film seems to understand that discomfort is more effective when it seeps in gradually than when blood is simply thrown at the screen.
What ultimately remains is a strange feeling. I would not say I was bored: there is enough movement, violence and bizarre material to keep the ninety-minute running time moving. But the brutality never comes to mean very much. The killer is repulsive, Georgina Campbell works well and the atmosphere occasionally lands, yet beneath all the excess I found less substance than I expected.
Perhaps that is the biggest problem: a film written by the screenwriter of Se7en and called Psycho Killer should leave a much deeper mark. This one leaves behind unpleasant images, a lingering sense of unease and a handful of curious ideas, but not much more. Strange, dirty and occasionally effective, yet too uneven for its madness to become truly memorable.
Mini Review: On paper, there were plenty of reasons for this to work: Georgina Campbell in the lead, an especially disturbing serial killer and Andrew Kevin Walker, the writer of Se7en, behind the screenplay. At first it even "smelled" promising. The problem is that Psycho Killer ultimately seems more interested in the brutality and strangeness of its villain than in building genuinely strong tension around him. The killer is unpleasant, which I assume is...