Most of the films on The Midnight Selections are pretty well regarded by critics. The Golden Glove is not. But sometimes I come across a title that I just get a feeling about anyways and that feeling usually doesn’t steer me wrong. This is one of those times.

But to really appreciate The Golden Glove, I need to put it into the right context. This is a German film directed by Fatih Atkins. It is a loose adaptation of a novel by Heinz Strunk and his fictionalized account of the real-life serial killer Fritz Honka- known for his vile and violent, and occasionally murderous, treatment of elderly women, usually after late nights at the bar. The film leans far more into extreme content than it does horror.

Truth be told, The Golden Glove is not a scary film. It isn’t really that gorey of a film either. Most of the gore is heard, not shown. It is the film’s harsh and realistic treatment of Honka’s brutal drunken sexual exploits that have earned the film its 18+ rating and why critics were probably put off by it…which is too bad because The Golden Glove is actually an unusually inglorious take on the serial killer genre that doubles as one of the best films on alcoholism I’ve ever seen.

Needless to say, The Golden Glove should not be a film you show on date night. There is some humour in the film; but it is like pitch, pitch black. 

In fact, the title is actually the name of a bar Strunk frequented in the red-light district of Hamburg during the early 1970s. The film does an incredible job showing the bleakness of the area during this time. The prostitutes are old. The bar patrons are lonely. And the lingering sadness of the Second World War and a divided Germany looms large like a fog.

At the start of the film, we watch Strunk, played by Jonas Dassier, in the act of killing a prostitute. He is living in a big city, so he isn’t particularly inconspicuous in his attempts to dispose of the body, and yet the excessive disparity of the neighbourhood allows for his actions to mostly go unnoticed.

On top of being a serial killer, Strunk is a barely functional alcoholic that is able to hold down a job, but is unable to break his awful nightly routine. On many nights, Strunk frequents The Golden Glove, listens to the other regulars joke, gets piss drunk and tries to buy drinks for women in descending order of attractiveness. But he is creepy and ugly so most women won’t give him the time of day, so he is left taking home the old, unattractive women who are also desperate, raging alcoholics. Of course, this frustrates Strunk, who is both a violent drunk and has no recourse as to how to properly behave around women. 

Once home, Strunk commands these women to satisfy him sexually for the promise of more alcohol and has no scruples about treating these women as less-than-human. But he also suffers from erectile dysfunction and this makes him quick to anger.

Of course, these women do have minds of their own and even at their lowest, most can recognize a bad situation. When they do, Strunk lashes out, sometimes with murderous intent. 

And so the cycle repeats, except Atkins does an excellent job making every encounter feel a little bit different, so we don’t actually know with certainty how each will end.

One thing that amazes me is that Jonas Dassier was in his early twenties when The Golden Glove was shot. In real life, he is also a really handsome man. But obviously, to play Strunk, Dassier had to look much older, and uglier. It is hard to ignore the hunch and those yellow teeth. Still, casting Dassier was a bold choice that works for a few reasons. For one thing, it is hard to place an age on Strunk. He looks to be at least in his forties..yet he also looks like life could have just kicked the shit out of a thirty year old. In either case, he is much younger than the women he is taking home and much older than the women he fantasizes about. It adds both empathy and horror to his character. But not, as many serial killer films are accused of doing, glorification. No. Absolutely nobody watching is going to see anything glamorous about Strunk’s life.

And Dassier actually has the acting chops to pull this character off. He plays the pathetic, yet volatile and menacing alcoholic to perfection. It is quite the performance. (A shout out to many of the older actresses who play his victims as well.) 

And this is partially what sets The Golden Glove apart from other serial killer movies. Strunk is no mastermind. He keeps going back to the same location to find these women. And people are frequently commenting on the smell of his apartment because he lazily hides parts of the bodies within the wall. If times weren’t so tough, his victims weren’t viewed as so inconsequential and his neighbourhood less depraved, there is no doubt Strunk would have been caught in a heartbeat. The film even hints at the idea that Strunk could stay sober, he might not have even felt an urge to kill…though he’d still be a pretty awful person who should not be around women…which is why he drinks in the first place. 

And to be honest, Atkin’s direction of The Golden Glove deserves a lot more praise than it earned. Had this film been made in the nineties, when crime films ruled the indie film scene, I believe this movie would have been heavily hailed by critics. There is something very Tarantino-esque about the way Atkin’s tells this story without feeling like the cheap imitation that so many of those other nineties films were at the time. (I love how the subplot involving Petra and Willi develops.) It is a vignette-style film with a gritty realism that adds to what some critics have argued to be seemingly little point. But I take issue with that latter point. The detail to which this The Golden Glove captures the old alcoholics bar scene is remarkable. (Think Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge, but with more rape, murder and German in the soundtrack.) And though they are not outright villainized, those working the bar are intentionally depicted as having a high tolerance for the deviant, licentious behaviour. The film’s subtext has a lot to say about alcohol abuse and the social and the willing ignorance that exasperates social problems. That The Golden Gloves’ matter-of-fact tone doesn’t lead to unnecessary moralizing about Strunk’s obvious evil hardly seems like a genuine criticism because it is this tone that helps make the bar sections of the film so relatable. 

Fatih Atkin’s The Golden Glove is a unique entry into the serial killer canon. I’d even argue that it’s the best serial killer film of the decade had it not been for Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built. This is a film that is begging to be critically reevaluated by an audience that isn’t put off by its extreme content. The performances and direction in this film are masterful.