C+ | A budding sociopath keeps himself from killing people by investigating murders in his small town. Directed by Billy O'Brien Starring Max Record and Christopher Lloyd Initial Review by Jon Kissel |
On our recent Best of 2018 So Far podcast, I raved about The End of the Fucking World. It’s by accident that I saw what is still one of my favorite TV series of the year before I saw I Am Not a Serial Killer. These are essentially the same pieces of fiction. A teen male who is sure he’s a sociopath bides time until the inevitable moment when he makes his first kill, but he discovers what it means to follow through on those impulses and that he doesn’t have to be like the people that do so. The lesson that brain chemistry is not destiny is a powerful one that the species has had to continually remind itself of, and it’s something pitched at my wavelength due to my preference for both skepticism and liberalism. However, I Am Not a Serial Killer is no End of the Fucking World thanks to its own choices of who the villain is and what the viewer is supposed to feel about him. It doesn’t believe that sociopathy is interesting enough on its own, and needlessly spices things up with the supernatural.
When Billy O’Brien’s film is spending time with his teen protagonist, I Am Not a Serial Killer is at its best. Max Records, so great in personal favorite Where the Wild Things Are, gets his only other role of comparable size here. This is not the case of a child actor being put into an alternate universe where everyone’s attractive and reenacting a middle-aged person’s idea of modern teenagerdom. Records’ John Wayne Cleaver (name’s a little on the nose) is wholly believable physically and emotionally, from his complexion to his gait to his mannerisms. Records hasn’t worked since this film and has no roles on the horizon, so maybe he so melted into John that he is in fact embarking on a cross-country killing spree. He’s an actor playing a character who’s also acting, a layered performance that stresses pleasantness and courtesy on the surface while masking violence and volcanic rage. Watching him move through the world is compelling in exactly the same way End of the Fucking World is compelling, an emotional outsider trying to decide whether he’s going to blend with this society or actively work against it.
The addition of supernatural elements is where the film loses me, both because it’s thematically muddled and because it takes focus away from John. With whatever monster Christopher Lloyd’s character is, the film contrives a way to not make the antagonist wholly evil, in that he needs to kill to continue to live and he needs to live because he loves his wife. That gets the film away from its mirror structure. If John goes on to be a killer, it won’t be because he needs new lungs; he’ll do it because he’s lacking the connection necessary to value the lives he’s taking. If O’Brien and co-writer Christopher Hyde instead mean to demonstrate that a person can have intense human relationships while also being a murderer, then that’s a much less interesting film. The inclusion of the William Blake poem, in which a predator laments the inherent cruelty of its existence, presupposes that monsters like Lloyd’s Crowley have a real-world equivalent. It works great for the character, but it’s in a different film than the one that John’s in. The idea that people are given these compulsive crosses to bear is the most charitable take, but they still have to take the action. The pedophile priests that are back in the news had their monstrous compulsion, but the idea that I should sympathize with their burden that they then made the choice to act on is something I Am Not a Serial Killer is too thin to engage with, if anyone even wanted to.
Like Records, O’Brien doesn’t have anything listed on imdb in the future, which is a shame because while I lose the thread with the film as it nears its conclusion, this is tight visual storytelling. One of the best films of 2018, First Reformed, has a scene of pink gunk filling a container, and it may have aped the embalming fluid scene here. This and other visceral, sensual shots are adjacent to body horror for me, a preferred genre that revels in the gloops and glops that organic substances emit. It’s an example of imagery informing character, as one can imagine John-as-killer, scraping human viscera off a bone much like he does with the chicken leg in the cafeteria.
I Am Not a Serial Killer has its dark charms, but bites off more than was necessary. It’s telling such a good story in the beginning, but doesn’t hold interest as it devolves into a more straightforward cat-and-mouse chase. Despite my reservations and mere appreciation of this film, I hope Records and O’Brien get back to work, as they’re too gifted to not be telling more stories and creating new characters. C+
The addition of supernatural elements is where the film loses me, both because it’s thematically muddled and because it takes focus away from John. With whatever monster Christopher Lloyd’s character is, the film contrives a way to not make the antagonist wholly evil, in that he needs to kill to continue to live and he needs to live because he loves his wife. That gets the film away from its mirror structure. If John goes on to be a killer, it won’t be because he needs new lungs; he’ll do it because he’s lacking the connection necessary to value the lives he’s taking. If O’Brien and co-writer Christopher Hyde instead mean to demonstrate that a person can have intense human relationships while also being a murderer, then that’s a much less interesting film. The inclusion of the William Blake poem, in which a predator laments the inherent cruelty of its existence, presupposes that monsters like Lloyd’s Crowley have a real-world equivalent. It works great for the character, but it’s in a different film than the one that John’s in. The idea that people are given these compulsive crosses to bear is the most charitable take, but they still have to take the action. The pedophile priests that are back in the news had their monstrous compulsion, but the idea that I should sympathize with their burden that they then made the choice to act on is something I Am Not a Serial Killer is too thin to engage with, if anyone even wanted to.
Like Records, O’Brien doesn’t have anything listed on imdb in the future, which is a shame because while I lose the thread with the film as it nears its conclusion, this is tight visual storytelling. One of the best films of 2018, First Reformed, has a scene of pink gunk filling a container, and it may have aped the embalming fluid scene here. This and other visceral, sensual shots are adjacent to body horror for me, a preferred genre that revels in the gloops and glops that organic substances emit. It’s an example of imagery informing character, as one can imagine John-as-killer, scraping human viscera off a bone much like he does with the chicken leg in the cafeteria.
I Am Not a Serial Killer has its dark charms, but bites off more than was necessary. It’s telling such a good story in the beginning, but doesn’t hold interest as it devolves into a more straightforward cat-and-mouse chase. Despite my reservations and mere appreciation of this film, I hope Records and O’Brien get back to work, as they’re too gifted to not be telling more stories and creating new characters. C+
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