The Clovehitch Killer

I’m a Hitchcock fan. Atmosphere and slow-building tension is a wonderful thing. The slow, steady drip of dread, permeating a movie, can be quite enjoyable. But when the movie lays all its cards out on the table, and THEN tried to do the slow build … something gets lost. So, the movie tells you who the killer is 15 minutes into it, but then expends a TON of energy trying to walk it back. When the main character discovers his father is a serial killer, the movie kicks off into a series of lame pretend misdirections and pink herrings (they’re not red, because they’re not strong enough to be so). Whether it’s his father charming him and explaining things away, to a lame attempt at shifting responsibility to someone else, to a pathetic last minute attempt to explain it all away when he’s caught red handed. All of this is in an effort to try to build this cat-and-mouse game between father and son … but the son so desperately doesn’t want to believe his dad is a killer, the game doesn’t work, so the tension is undercut. It’s hard to feel any tension when you know everything, but nobody told the movie this. What saves this movie is the acting. Dylan McDermott does a great job, balancing the charming, gregarious middle-class Everyman image with an unseemly undercurrent of mania, obsession and murder. The son, played by Charlie Plummer, likewise has a tenuous balancing act; a boy who is scared and wants to know the truth, but doesn’t want to know it if it shatters the image of his dad. I just wish it was in service of a better script. At no point does the tension the script wants to be there actually manifest. And the last fifteen minutes takes all established character motivation and throws it out the window so the ending the script writers want can happen, regardless of how much sense it makes. It’s infuriating to see the characters betray themselves because the script needs it, but with a movie that has failed to be as captivating as it wants to be, it makes sense.