Mindhunter by David Fincher

The Mindhunter: a film or a documentary?

Don’t take my claims too hard as I barely got to episode 5 out of 10 and evidently I won’t be getting any further.

Well.. This is not David Fincher that I know of. I didn’t see his undersaturated style, nor did I see the drive, intensity and intrigue. David Fincher usually pays enormous attention to detail and sometimes takes his virgoesque perfectionism to the extremes by making actors deliver their best-to-yet performances, repeating the same line 359 times until they get it exactly in pre-planned 1 minute 27 second frame. I didn’t feel it in here. Actors don’t have chemistry with each other or with the content. The show is basically miscast.

It starts fairly good though, tells about times when the expression “serial killer” was just being developed and apparanetly was preceeded by “sequence killers” which doesn’t sound right. Right?
It has this noir atmosphere, hands down but it doesn’t deliver the way it should.
No, I didn’t expect Mindhunter to be like Hannibal, although the premise is similar. I expected smth smarter but it sometimes feels too smart for its own good.
Well, they interview real-life serial killers like Edmund Kemper (the co-ed killer), talk about Charles Manson and etc but it’s not exciting.

The show doesn’t remotely live up to lines used in it
“Are criminals born or are they made?”
“How to get ahead of crazy if we don’t know how crazy thinks?”
Instead it uses words like “oeuvre” and “vocation” making you believe even just for a second that you’re probably watching smth great. You’re not.

I believe that criminals are made. I believe that everybody is born with an inclination to just about any type of crime including murder but only some get to the point where they exercise the inclination. They are being driven to it. By other people, events and circumstances. I don’t believe it’s a disease or if it is, we all have it. Deep down. I believe that childhood and family can have such an impact on a person that some day they can go on a murderous spree. Take a look at all the serial killers. They are not plain evil as some claim. Did any of them have a happy childhood? No, they start as victims. It’s a spiral, a loop.

Knowing the show would be developing around this ideas and the master developer is David Fincher I obviously got excited. In vain.
Besides, David doesn’t direct every episode here. Just 4.

Eh

:/