Chasing down a serial killer is usually thrilling. Think of The Silence of the Lambs. Well, don’t remember her so much because otherwise The Boston Stranglerwith Keira Knightleythey might find it a lesser film.
The film, which premiered in Argentina directly in streaming, despite the cast and produced by Ridley Scott, begins in 1965, in Michigan. There’s a strangulation in an apartment. A neighbor hears screams from the other side of the wall. The film is based on true events, when TV was in tube and not everyone had color in the United States.
Let’s jump back a few years, and we meet Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley, who turns 38 on Sunday, but looks older) in the editorial office of the newspaper Record Americanfrom Boston, where male reporters cover the police, and women, affluence, or lifestyle, daily life.
Loretta is restless and perhaps a little because she is tired of receiving articles for Sunday on commission, for example of a new toaster, she begins to cut out news published in other media, and discovers certain pieces of information, which she begins to connect.
“I think I found something”
“I think I’ve found something,” he tells his editor, played by Chris Cooper, who usually plays the bad guy, but that’s not the case. Three women were strangled in two weeks: here’s what he found. “You won’t cover the murders, you have no experience,” says the boss, who will receive the usual “How am I going to have experience if you don’t give me a chance?”
Persevere and you will succeed, they say, or Loretta must have heard it, because here she is, this mother of three and married with an understanding husband, to an extent, determined to investigate the case.
A case which, as we said, is based on real events, and since it is not necessary for them to know what really happened -it would spoil something that some will know-, we won’t say much.
Simply that the killer began by attacking elderly women who lived alone, and these opened the doors of their apartments to him. The investigators never found a break-in, nor had they taken anything. Yes, the killer had left the women strangled, with a bow made with nylon stockings. Yes, as a gift, a gift. One time, the victim had her legs spread and bound. Some more, “a broomstick between the legs.”
Someone will say, a detective (Alessandro Nivola, not to be confused with Sam Rockwell, whom he looks a lot like) that the strangler – as Loretta nicknames him – “is as careful as he is crazy”.
The first three victims, Loretta writes in her diary, “did not know each other and were brothers in death”.
“There is nothing inside The globe or in Herald”, she tells her and encourages her husband by reading over breakfast with their three children, at home. “You were the first.”
“We cover up the news, we don’t believe it,” Jean Cole (Carrie Coon, mother of Ghostbusters: Legacylisten), an investigative reporter who disguises herself as a nurse if necessary to get information. The two of them will do the hard work, yes, what, apparently, the Boston Police did not.
In Zodiacabout another serial killer David Fincher he built a thriller that captivated. In this The Boston Strangler there was enough material to do something like this – several narrative hints, time jumps, not one but several suspects – but, and usually there are gods but when things don’t end well, it’s not scary here. It has no smell. Does not exist.
That, maybe, maybe, in one of them, is writer-director Matt Ruskin (Crown heights).
The Boston Strangler It touches on more than just passing the position of women journalists in the media. The fact is that the film is perhaps too pleasing to the viewer, and not just politically correct.
Knightley is fine, except when he takes on that morbid look he has had since his death Pirates of the Caribbean.
Watch out if they decide to see The Boston Strangler, with the translation subtitle at the end, when told what happened to the characters in real life. Since I don’t want to preempt anything, I won’t tell you what he says, but he has to do with the 13 murders and a certain suspect is charged not with the thirteen, but with the thirteenth. In English it is clear…
“The Boston Strangler”
Suspense. United States, 2023. Original title: “The Boston Strangler“. 112′, SA 16. From: Matt Ruskin. With: Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon, Chris Cooper, Alessandro Nivola, David Dastmalchian. Available in: Star+.
Source: Clarin
