Mark Reviews Movies: THE GOLDEN GLOVE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 26, 2019

There is a point to The Golden Glove, a fly-on-the-wall look at the life of serial killer Friedrich "Fritz" Honka, who killed at least four people in Hamburg from 1970 until he was arrested in 1975. Obviously, the concept, to understate matters, is not particularly pleasant. Writer/director Fatih Akin's approach to this material is even less so.

For here is not only a series of brutal attacks that result in murder, re-created with a sickening degree of matter-of-factness (each one captured in a single medium shot of what happens or a close-up of the killer's face as he's doing it), but also an accurate re-creation of the squalor of the movie's locales. The content is disgusting. The backdrop against which this story unfolds is equally unappealing.

That's the point, of course—that Honka, portrayed under layer upon layer of makeup and prosthetics by actor Jonas Dassler (who actually has the good looks of a legitimate movie star beneath the falsities), was both an anomaly of his world and very much a part of it. He was different because he murdered sex workers who didn't do what he wanted or chuckled because he was impotent. He was the same as the rest of this world, though, because he was poor, lived in filth, drank far too much and too often, and possessed no clear goal or purpose in his miserable life.

The difference is apparent. The connection between Fritz and his peers, although never overtly stated, is almost as obvious. Just one visit to the eponymous bar—where everyone (all of them unkempt and/or downright dirty) drinks to excess at all times of the day and the moldy funk of the place seems to hang in the air—is enough to show that.

If that is the point, what is the purpose in Akin, adapting Heinz Strunk's novel of the same name, making it? That's more difficult to discover or even, for that matter, consider, because Akin seems to be living in a world of dreary, unpleasant aesthetics with this movie.

It's all about surfaces—the grime of Fritz's apartment, with its walls covered with pictures of naked women, and the wretchedness of his bathroom and the crawlspace, where he keeps certain body parts of his victims, swarming with flies. Then there's the man himself. The real Honka was by no means attractive, especially with his nose flattened after a car accident several years before he started killing. The Fritz of the movie, though, is like some kind of horror-movie monster—his pockmarked face, the busted nose, those jagged and decaying teeth, a lazy eye that almost seems to be bulging out of its socket when he isn't wearing his corrective glasses.

The opening scene sets up the tone (dispassionate), the pace (slow), the method (lots of long takes), and the content of the rest of the movie. In it, Fritz, having murdered a woman, now has to figure out what to do with the body. After a lot of stalling and imbibing on plenty of schnapps, he begins sawing the dead woman's body into pieces. Akin doesn't show it, but the sound effects are more than enough.

The rest of the story has Fritz finding other women over the course of five years (with a big jump in time at one point). One woman, whom he lures to his apartment with the promise of liquor, essentially becomes his slave, to be verbally, physically, and sexually abused while he hopes that she'll introduce him to her daughter. When that plan fails, he ends up murdering a different woman, who also comes back to his apartment (now reeking of decomposing flesh, which he blames on his downstairs neighbors' Greek cooking) looking for free drinks.

On and on the story goes, with a brief interlude in which Fritz gives up alcohol and tries to keep a job (only to fall back into drinking and to assault a woman co-worker), and deeper and deeper Akin falls into this pit of horrific violence, repulsive locales, filthy people, and unending misery. Fritz murders and goes on with his life, killing again whenever he has had too much to drink and feels undermined.

Another woman is killed, and nobody seems to notice. A pair of teenage tourists, one of whom catches Fritz's eye, from a well-to-do part of the city plan to visit the impoverished place for thrills, and we can't decide if Akin is criticizing us as tourists of this horror or if the filmmaker doesn't realize that he's the outsider looking to exploit lurid reality for a cheap thrill. The Golden Glove doesn't have answers, and it's not interested in asking questions, either.

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