The Golden Glove

Dir. Fatih Akin

Germany

115 Minutes

2019

Starring: Jonas Dassler, Margarete Tiesel, Katja Studt, Marc Hosemann

​**/***** Fatih Akin moves a far cry from the humanity of Head On and The Edge of Heaven with this nasty and vile piece of business about serial killer Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler). The film opens with an unsettling static shot of Honka dealing with the first of four bodies that he will hide in the walls of his decrepit attic apartment leading to him hesitatingly sawing off the head. It soon settles into a rhythm of Honka frequenting the titular "Golden Glove" bar, getting plastered, and attempting to invite some young beauty to his apartment (all of whom typically sneer at his big nose, unaligned eyes, and general creepy demeanor). The "bigger" episode of the film takes place early (and is perhaps the only thing that technically can be defined as an 'arc" for the character) where Honka takes on a sort of live-in housekeeper, solely because he has designs on her young, estranged daughter, who he fantasizes about eating raw meat. Akin is clearly attempting something here in depicting the external lifestyle of such a figure. His shots linger on the ugliness on display, with the space of the apartment doing "double-duty" as both the squalor that Honka is content to live in and also the messiness, chaos, and dismal awfulness of his mind. The set-design for the apartment is well crafted, though its unchanging nature somewhat stifles the ability for creativity or even variety in the shots (though highlights, and rightfully so, the repetitious nature of Honka's routine). The same goes for The Golden Glove bar, where regulars with awful nicknames, personalities, and conversations form a sort of deviant community (one bartender is referred to solely as Anus "because it's funny). The sordid visual nature makes the film feel even more violent than it already is, though Akin thankfully spares his viewer things like a woman having four glass bottles smashed across her head or the aforementioned head sawing, but is still quite liberal with the violence to the point where it feels borderline exploitative. Dassler seems committed to the bit, but seems to also put in the effort physically where Akin shafts him on absolutely any internalization (with the except of a couple of fantasy images early on that feel out of place in their lack of any consistency). Comparisons made to von Trier's The House That Jack Built feel correct solely because of the timing of their releases, though that film finds success in both its intellectual exercise of a killer justifying their actions, and also that von Trier's interests are not limited to such a surface level exercise of his subject. ​September 27th, 2019