Der goldene Handschuh

Well I never heard of Fatih Akin before but if all his movies are like this one then I will for sure watch others from him. Der Goldene Handschuh (The Golden Glove) is harsh and brutal but most important a perfect reenactment of the vile things the German serial Killer Fritz Honka commited. Also a great job from Jonas Dassler with his character of Honka. And big credits to the make-up artists that transformed all the characters into what they looked like. The whole cast acted well and gave this movie the perfect depressing state they're in. The scenes look like they are shot in the filthiest places of Sankt Pauli in Hamburg. Some scenes, well almost all of them, are really brutal, and that's how it should be when you make a movie about a serial killer. Honka was a deranged bully and sadist. To me The Golden Glove is one of the better movies about an existing serial killer. Not for everybody, but certainly well made.

This is a grotesque interpretation of a novel apparently inspired by a real-life 1970s serial killer. The film was hated by most critics, particularly in its festival debut, because it was considered too repellent and sensational. Conversely, I suspect mainstream horror fans won't like it because it's not crafted like a suspense film-the kills are presented in a depressing, banal rather than "exciting" way.

It's a tough movie to watch, but for reasons that I think are strengths: You rarely see this kind of bleak underside of life depicted accurately in movies. Even films like "Barfly" that purport to also be about alcoholic Skid Row types generally cast the most glamorous actors possible, and make their characters' poverty, self-destruction etc. look sort of "quirky" and "colorful." Here, even the (very few) attractive characters are presented in the worst 70s clothes and hairstyles (with terrible period German pop music in the background), while most of the figures here are old, ugly and conspicuously unhealthy. (It's kind of amazing afterward to look up the cast on IMBD afterward, and see all their nice, clean publicity photos-you'd swear they emptied out a homeless shelter for many of the roles, rather than using professional actors with long resumes.)

It's an incredibly bleak milieu that is its own answer to the question of why police didn't track down this killer sooner-he, and his victims (also drunks and/or prostitutes), were all people that German society had long ago given up on. No one cared about them, or whether they went missing.

You can fault the film for giving very limited "insight" into the protagonist or why he murdered. But he's clearly just a mentally deficient person just functional enough to support himself, so he did not fall into the hands of authorities that might have diagnosed and treated his considerable problems. The lead's performance is so convincingly repellent that I was stunned to see that he's actually a very handsome, young actor-here his age is indeterminate, and his physical acting/makeup is subtle enough that you really think you're watching a somewhat disabled and disfigured person rather than a clever performer's approximation of one.

Anyway, it's a thoroughly unpleasant movie whose characters are profane in the dumbest and crudest ways, whose sexual acts (when they can perform at all) are depicted with nasty vividness, who live in squalor and die in filth. Which, frankly, is probably a pretty accurate depiction of most serial killers' lives and activities. If watching that reality isn't exactly "entertaining," it's nonetheless pretty compelling if you can take it. I wouldn't want to watch a movie with this brutally misanthropic a vision like this very often, but once in a while, it acts as a sort of palate cleanser to remind you that most violence in real life is ugly and pathetic, not an exciting thrill ride.

Not for the fainthearted. Not even for the worldly cynical. This is not enjoyable in the conventional entertainment sense: it is brutal, repulsive, despairing, terrible and powerful. It depicts the marginal lower depths of human filth, driven by its single appetite and relentless, amoral need to satisfy it.

Technically the film is a marvel, the production design and the atmosphere created means the scenes have the stench of depravity and human waste, especially in Honka's attic. Similarly, the photography and editing are compelling, and that all says that the director has done the job.

The actors are excellent, the make-up artists too, who made them into degenerate hopeless alcoholics, but the lead, Dassler as Honka, has to be noted because he has incarnated this role to an awful degree. Without that performance the film might falter, be more like a movie, not as document of murder.

If Fritz Lang could see this film, he'd be proud, because it has the same ruthless eye that he had in his German films. It takes the audience into the middle of a horror and never lets go.

Acting is really really good, love the atmosphere/camera work, and great story. Can be graphic at times, brings in all kinds of emotions. Highly recommend.

One must wonder what director Fatih Akin was thinking in bringing to life the story of German serial killer Fritz Honka, famous for several murders of prostitutes in the early 1970's. Akin's previous film "In the Fade" was a powerful dramatic effort that seemed a lot more of a real story than this insanely bizarre film. If the idea behind "The Golden Glove" was to conceive the most disgusting and unappealing film ever made, to depict the art of grotesque and how crazed some people and some lives are, then he made a glorious film. But I'm not condemning the film; in fact, I've find it very good though explicitly graphic and twisted as I haven't seen in ages. The director has some good cards to make his game and the trick works because he's anchored with great subtle technique that makes the experience interesting and the excellent performance of Jonas Dassler, a brave young man who undress himself from vanity and fear to create one of the most frightening, sickening, ugliest characters to ever live. The make-up department did an outstanding job in turning the handsome Dassler into the bizarre-looking Honka; the rest is up to Dassler to imitate his speech pattern due to a speech impediment the real Honka had. Here's a chamaleonic star we will be seeing a lot in more films.

It seemed at the beginning of this review I'd be detracting the movie but nope. Warning for possible future viewers: this isn't a nice experience (it's not supposed to, anyway) but it's definitely one of those films where you'll be walking out in disgust, or criticizing it harshly without looking objectively or just pointing that it's a pointless film. The very first scene is a clear indicative of that with a long shot, no cuts, of Honka killing his first victim. Sickening!

To me, like similarly themed one such as "Angst" or "Henry: Portrait of a Killer" it's a way to have a deep look inside criminal minds, their acts and behaviors, and on an ultimate case, to see what the media doesn't show to you. There's a strange sense of curiosity as well in seeing how film directors approach brutal subjects: if they're just making psycho-analytical films with a sense of making the audience think or if it's just gory exploitation that doesn't develop to anything. "The Golden Glove" almost falls into the second trap but Mr. Akin gives us little moments in between gruesome murders to explore the personality of Honka, his pathetic miserable life which seems to present a "reasoning" behind his murders - another case of a man with a turbulent childhood and psychological problems came along. It's a sheer reality, it doesn't go easy nor should be.

However, the bumps along the way also makes the film strange to see it. The bar from the title is there to put some relief on audiences, a place where Honka is a regular meeting another sort of odd characters, heavy drinkers as he is but inside there it's all about awkward/dark comic situations - and the film is full of that. Nervous laughters for some; distractive for others. To me, it was a plot point to connect beginning and ending; just like the pretty blonde girl Honka fantasizes about from time to time while he's having his strange sexual encounters with old, fat prostitutes, later his victims. Outside of the fantasy inside his head, the girl appears three times; other than that, it's all a perverted wet-dream of a sick man. A little question of absurd: he's a bad Quasimodo of all sorts but since he's the one who favors paying for sex why is he always chasing old hookers?

Demanding sex-workers back then, but really, we don't have such a scene to explore more of Honka's failures as a man and we're barely told that he was married twice.

And as for accuracies, the film jumps facts and events or place them in the wrong period (1970-1974 was the years of Fritz crimes but we get the impression one or two years has passed).

And we get back to wondering about the real aim of the picture. It'll possibly looked as just another nasty story made by an insane mind; or that quality over substance again is overshadowed (at times it feels that - the long takes, camera angles and movements, the real feeling of being part of 1970's Germany) but there isn't enough material to make us stunned. If we look the film as a the tragic horror story with real people, the aim of making audiences terrified, nervous, nauseated, Mr. Akin delivers a spetacle of which I cannot feel unimpressed with mixed thoughts about how such individual as Honka could ever exist. The power of imagination must never be lost, and by that I mean that it's not just going back in time to get a true feeling of things that the film works, but many times I kept imagining the scents and the stench of Honka's tiny apartment, always unclean, smelly due to the corpses left. Akin puts those settings - there and the bar - where you are in awe with everything, it's like 90% of excrutiating moments for the remaining 10% of curiosity is what makes some of us keep going to see what's gonna happen next. I can't think of a current director who can do that with a material such as this. Or anything else, really.

If anything of the tiny bits of qualities exposed here as why the picture works or if it's interesting don't convince you, at least you cannot deny that Dassler's creepy, violent and twisted performance is one in a lifetime. He is transformed not just physically but there are insightful moments where you can enter his mind, the inner abysm of Honka or at least the ideal the director makes of him. The sequence where he befriends a pretty woman on his job as a night guard is one of those surprising moments when he's all awkward near her, quite polite at the same time finding ways to be around her but it's played for a long time as a contrast to the brutality he treats the older women (one of them becomes his maid, practically, of whom he's very abusive). The subtle and little moments of change of him is what made me going. To see what comes next... 8/10.