The Golden Glove

Director Fatih Akin pushes his cold-blooded horror premise to the limit while spiking the plot with unsettling hints of rudely transgressive black humor.

Akin (In the Fade, The Edge of Heaven) takes an atypical deep dive into grotesquery with this serial-killer story based on Heinz Strunk’s bestseller on the life of notorious German serial killer Fritz Honka, set in the early Seventies in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn red light district. Not for the faint of heart, the film caused a critical furor in its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, with bizarre caricatures of scarred, rat-like Honka (Dassler, handsome co-star of THE SILENT REVOLUTION completely transformed with prosthetics) and the washed-up prostitutes, elderly bag ladies, and wasted junkies he lures to his fetid hole of an apartment to rape and murder. With mannered performances and flourishes of finely honed craft, Akin pushes his cold-blooded horror premise to the limit while spiking the plot with unsettling hints of rudely transgressive black humor. In German and Greek with English subtitles.