Mark Reviews Movies: THE CLOVEHITCH KILLER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 15, 2018

It doesn't take much for a child to look at his or her parent in a completely different light. A parent typically puts on a show for a child, because parents want their kids to be good and decent people—reflections of the parents' best selves.

Then something slips at some point. A child might see his or her mother be angry—truly angry—for the first time. A kid might hear a father say one of those four-letter words, which the child has heard at some point but knows better than to say around mom or dad. There's nothing bad about this, of course. Kids have to learn that their parents are regular people, because that's part of how the parent-child relationship evolves.

Christopher Ford's screenplay for The Clovehitch Killer puts a dementedly twisted spin, involving a dormant serial killer, on this usual evolution. In it, a teenage boy, who sees his father as a good man and a pillar of the local community, discovers one unexpected thing about dear old dad. It might be odd for the kid, but on the surface, it seems relatively normal. In dad's pickup truck, there's a pornographic picture.

What's wrong with this? Well, it is a bit odd that dad is either hiding porn in his truck or keeping it in his pocket, so that it falls along the side of the seat. Maybe the picture doesn't even belong to Tyler's (Charlie Plummer) dad, since it was hidden on the passenger side of the truck. Even so, it's strange, because Tyler's father Don (Dylan McDermott) is a fine husband to Cindy (Samantha Mathis) and father to Tyler, as well as a Susie (Brenna Sherman). Don is also scout leader, a Christian who takes his family to church every Sunday, and someone who appears to follow the letter of his religious dogma.

When having "the talk" with Tyler, Don even mentions that sexual fantasies are fine, because a man can't stop what's going through his mind. In dad's lesson, pictures, though, go beyond that. Tyler doesn't confront his father about the picture that was in dad's truck, of course.

There's a major reason for this, and it has little to do with a good son's hesitation to call his old man a hypocrite to his face, while the two are bonding over a sex talk and sharing forbidden sodas that Don keeps hidden away in the shed. By this point, Tyler and we know a bit more about the history of this little town, which turns Don's apparent two-facedness into a reason for some amount of concern.

There's a lot beneath the surface of this sleepy locale, and to the credit of Ford and director Duncan Skiles, the filmmakers don't turn this material into a broad, satirical diatribe against the hypocrisy of suburbia or of religious folks. Their intentions are more specific, mostly to do with how a father-son relationship is tested by the son's realization that there's more to his father than the boy ever imagined.

Unfortunately for the kid, this realization has to do with a decade-old series of murders in the area. Every year, the town holds a memorial for the serial killer's eight, confirmed victims, and it's something that Tyler has never really considered. That is until his girlfriend Amy (Emma Jones) finds that picture before the two are about to make out in a parking lot.

At first, the rumor mill of Tyler's classmates begins churning that the picture is his. Making matters worse, the picture portrays a bondage scenario. Nobody connects the dots between knot-enthusiast Don, the picture, and the so-called "Clovehitch Killer," who got his name for leaving a clove hitch knot tied to each home of his victims.

Tyler doesn't voice his suspicions to anyone, which both is accurate in terms of this character and creates a certain type of tension to the proceedings. The teenager does begin an investigation of sorts, sneaking into dad's shed, where, beneath the floorboards, he finds a shoebox filled with harmless magazine's atop some naughtier ones—as well as a photo that suggests this might be more than a kinky sexual fantasy for Don.

The suspense here isn't in overt conflicts. It's in the strain of the unspoken words between the father and son, and it's also in the perverse sense of discovery (A trip into an unfinished basement is chilling because Skiles lets us piece together the plans for the space). Tyler soon enlists the aid of Kassi (Madisen Beaty), a classmate who's an unofficial expert on the Clovehitch Killer for reasons that further complicate Tyler's involvement in figuring out the truth.

There are fine performances from Plummer, as a young man who gradually has to determine if the cohesion of his family or some kind of justice is the more important goal, and a transformative McDermott. For a while, the actor plays Don without any real hint as to whether or not he's a killer. As the story progresses, the film sets its focus on him, and McDermott so thoroughly establishes the character as normal, goofy, and vulnerable man that the slow revelations of his private thoughts and life are unsettling.

Ford's plotting becomes a little too tricky for its own good in the third act with an extended flashback (It makes narrative sense, in terms of maintaining the suspense of following Don, but it also feels like an overload of exposition in order to explain how a climactic confrontation comes to be). Still, The Clovehitch Killer is a subdued thriller that never sacrifices its fascinating study of a unique father-son dynamic.

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