The Golden Glove

Should a serial killer movie sympathise with its killer? The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh) comes perilously close to going all-in with real-life killer Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler), who killed four women in Hamburg between 1970 and 1974 and then hid their body parts in his attic. Grim, seedy, sleazy, disgusting, vile, the negative adjectives have piled up in discussions about this undoubtedly brilliantly made movie. I’d go for “pitiless” or “cosmically ironic”. More verbosely, it’s a cool exercise in the manipulation of the human tendency to imprint (like a duckling for the first “mamma” object it sees on hatching) suggesting the omnivorous writer/director Fatih Akin has been watching Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy … Read more