A serial killer strikes fear in the hearts of residents of Hamburg during the early 1970s.
Fatih Akin’s “The Golden Glove” is a fetid corpse flower of a movie, the type whose horrible odour only blossoms into theaters every few years. You can smell it simply by looking at it. It’s incessantly offensive; it’s like a port-o-potty overflowing in a movie. Even the living individuals seem to decompose in front of our eyes, and the sets are filled with the smell of feces and decomposing flesh.
Maggots shower into a little girl’s soup from the ceiling and fall through the walls. White fur may be grown in a pickle jar to create a winter coat. There is no escape from this vileness. It starts out with a lengthy, unblinking shot of its psychopathic protagonist stripping the body of a fat old prostitute and, with the aid of some drunken courage, chopping off her head with the crazed clumsiness of a chronic alcoholic. It’s difficult to imagine now, but this will be the most enjoyable part of this godforsaken novel.
Akin’s hollow spectacle of extreme ugliness, which purports to be a historical drama about the serial murderer Fritz Honka, who left a long and foul shadow over Hamburg’s red-light district in the early 1970s, never has the chutzpah (or the respect?) to do anything other than disgust its viewers. Well, goal achieved in that regard. The German-born writer-director, who had his biggest commercial success with the 2016 thriller “In the Fade,” threw away whatever goodwill he may have gained by following it up with one of the most revolting and blatantly repulsive things ever to be shown on a screen.
It’s a film that contrasts the visceral grotesquery of “Se7en” with the psychological depth of Kevin Spacey’s “Let Me Be Frank” video. It’s a film about the depravity that can infect a nation in the wake of a lost war, told with the clarity of a clogged toilet; a film informed by the radicalism of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the artistry of Uwe Boll. Most importantly, it is an act of karma against those who complained about “The House that Jack Built’s” purported dullness. You’ll beg the cinema gods for another journey through Lars von Trier’s anxiety slaughterhouse after the first 20 minutes of this.
Anyone who has seen “Head-On” or “The Edge of Heaven” is aware of Akin’s unyielding artistic vision, and his greatest works are challenging without being mocking. Even “In the Fade,” which had the audacity to recast a suicide bomber as a virtuous vigilante, was saved by a powerful emotional undercurrent and propelled forward by its director’s innate capacity to see the drama in every frame. For better or worse, Akin’s eye continues to be a magnificent thing, as he casts every character to the point of insanity and gives even the most emptily nihilistic sections of “The Golden Glove” the seriousness of stunning visual geometry. It seems like the only issue is with his vision.
The performance of Jonas Dassler as Fritz Honka defies categorization as “excellent” or “poor,” even though it is clear that he gave Akin precisely what the director desired. The attractive 23-year-old actor is disfigured behind pounds of revolting prosthetics, becoming a drunken beast twice his age. His pores like rusty dimes and are covered with filth from the years since his last shower. His skin is rough and covered in blisters. His eyes bulge when viewed through the heavy lenses of his standard-issue serial killer spectacles, which are occasionally hidden by the strings of his filthy combover. His teeth are black, and he has a flattened nose from a car accident that occurred before the start of the movie, which may assist to explain why he speaks like Marlon Brando did in “The Godfather.”
It’s difficult to discern if Fritz was created by the evil wizard Saruman from the primordial slime of Isengard or if he was born to human parents. One of the several ladies Fritz randomly approaches claims she “wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire” after taking one glance at the man.
But Dassler’s performance barely goes above the surface. On the contrary, the actor appears to be completely captivated by the evil character he is portraying. It’s not just in the way he moves or how his body is overcome by strong impulses like an uncontrollable sneeze; it’s also in his despairing eyes, which display a profound disdain for everything (women, most of all). This is a whole and thorough change, the type of chameleonic job Daniel Day-Lewis may have performed in the absence of better options.
Dassler currently has little choice except to move around smelling bad. Our Fritz is shown in one scene dismembering a victim in the middle of his attic flat (which is wallpapered with nude pin-ups of beautiful young women). The film’s title comes from the unfathomably damp St. Pauli dive pub where he becomes piss drunk in the following scene. The one after that finds him dragging a homeless Holocaust survivor back home and making her his sex slave and handmaiden. The two will never meet, but Fritz has so little in life to offer that even the mention of her soft young skin, even the thought of someone who still has blood in their veins, is enough to send him into an obsessive ecstasy and lift him above the lower depths of the downtrodden ghouls he drinks with every night. Fritz even makes the woman sign a contract that supposedly grants him physical rights to her estranged daughter.
That doesn’t work out though. The cycle keeps on. A Shell office hires Fritz to serve as a security guard. He discovers more suffering, more desperation, and a new lady to fetishize and assault there. Drinking more. more homicides. One particularly messy victim, whom Fritz savages with a sausage, exacts vengeance by putting horseradish (or some sort of pickle brine? ), on Fritz’s penis. It burns horribly, whatever it is. It goes without saying that everything in this film is horrifying, yet the most horrifying elements blend into a dull haze of filth, much like how your nose may become nose blind to a new odor after spending 90 minutes with your head buried in a septic tank.
Action is given priority over logic in Akin’s script, which maintains the grisly immediacy of the Heinz Strunk novel that served as its inspiration. However, this material is too dismal and lifeless to live in isolation. Akin’s refusal to even feign pity for his main character is one thing, but denying Fritz any kind of humanity is quite another. Viewers are left with no choice but to view the man as a loutish monster who was never going to be able to love and never had cause for confidence without even being given the slightest invitation to consider the origins of his alcoholism, to understand how it might have compromised his intellect, or even to understand why his nose is pointed in three different directions. He is simply a sallow demon that chose to live in this manner.
“The Golden Glove” has moments where it feels like you could watch a whole movie about the creature that lives under the trash in “Mulholland Drive,” if only in its most menacingly captivating scenes (but directed by some overqualified edge lord instead of David Lynch).
The economic miracle that swept through Germany in the decades after World War II may have been the inspiration for “The Golden Glove,” a frank depiction of the misfortune and depravity that awaited anyone who fell through the cracks while the rest of the nation tried to advance, but Akin is too consumed by the rot to detect its causes. Once you get acclimated to the stench, all you can do is wait for his movie to end because it is dead from the get-go.
