And another true crime film adaptation: Keira Knightley as a journalist on a dangerous mission.
On the trail of the strangler: Jean Cole (Carrie Coon, left) and Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley).imago
After Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, the Zodiac Killer, Henry Lee Lucas, the Manson Family, Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz, it’s getting hard to find another serial killer whose crimes are “interesting” enough to Make streaming fans shiver.
For Disney, writer-director Matt Ruskin has brought the little-known Boston Strangler out of the depths of crime history, a serial killer who terrified the East Coast of America around Boston in the early 1960s by killing 13 single women strangled with her pantyhose.
Badly polished story
Regulatory failures, incompetent investigators and a lack of networking ensured that the case could never be finally clarified. The Boston Strangler also got a permanent place in American pop culture, and the case was also told several times in the cinema. Most successful in 1968 by Richard Fleischer, starring Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. It should have been left at that. After the mega success of Netflix’s shocker series “Dahmer”, Disney jumped on the bandwagon before the last drop of blood was really squeezed out of the true crime genre.
The protagonist here is the journalist Loretta McLaughlin, who died in 2018, who linked the murders on the east coast and first made them known to a broad public with her newspaper articles. McLaughlin is played by Keira Knightley, who tries with limited success to advance the highly polished story.
McLaughlin works for the lifestyle section of a major Boston newspaper, tests toasters and is dissatisfied with her life and her job. She wants to write real stories and stumbles across the case of the strangler. Together with her colleague Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), she begins to investigate. The two women decisively advance the investigation and turn the story into a media spectacle. They persistently defend themselves against the rampant chauvinism in journalism and in the fight against crime and become local celebrities themselves.
It’s an interesting starting point for a story, and bears a lot of resemblance to the problems faced by newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) in solving the murders in David Fincher’s great Zodiac (2007). But director Ruskin misses all opportunities and delivers experienced, but ultimately too smooth thriller goods that don’t catch a minute and only gain momentum in the second half. As a result, the viewer remains largely unaffected.
Loretta McLaughlin’s struggle to assert herself in the male domain of journalism seems strangely shallow, every attempt at recognition lacks depth and passion, every smoked cigarette in the main editorial office looks as if it has been puffed. In addition, there is the penetrating fake antique filter, which takes the power out of all colors to give the film an authentic, dusty atmosphere, but darkens the whole thing so that you constantly threaten to nod off.
“Boston Strangler” is not a completely wasted lifetime, Keira Knightley is a great actress, but unfortunately she also doesn’t manage to give the plot a proper arc of tension. Everything ripples along, and if you already know Fincher’s “Zodiac”, you don’t have to see “Boston Strangler”. For everyone else, it’s still medium-length entertainment as long as you have a Disney+ subscription. It’s definitely not worth completing one for this.
Boston Strangler. Feature film, 112 minutes, Disney+