Akin adapts Heinz Strunk’s 2016 book, which told the true story of a German serial killer from the early ‘70s named Fritz Honka. A modicum of internet research reveals that Akin’s film deviates a great deal from the reported true story of Honka, which is itself an interesting fact if you buy into the theory that Akin is merely trying to present the true horrors of a psychopath. Clearly, artistic choices were made by him (and/or Strunk) in altering history, so the idea that “The Golden Glove” is some sort of groundbreaking example of “the way it really is” kind of falls apart.
Jonas Dassler plays Honka complete with a heavy make-up job and what looks like a sheen of grime and sweat. You can almost smell him. Akin and his team do their best work in the bar that gives the film its title, a haven for outcasts and reprobates where people barely notice someone as unsettling as Honka. He spends most of his days there before retiring to an attic apartment, which is wallpapered with photos of naked women and littered with rotting food and empty liquor bottles. He is drunk more often than not, and, oh yeah, the opening scene of the film features him sawing off the head of a naked, dead woman.
While that brutality is mostly out of frame, it is a clear gauntlet being thrown by Akin in the film’s prologue. This is going to be ugly and nauseating. Future murders are more often directly in frame, including when Honka bashes a woman’s head into a table or strangles the life out of another. In between, he goes to the bar, rants about not getting laid, and becomes obsessed with a local girl. Did I mention that he dismembers his victims and puts their body parts in a space between his wall and the roof? “The Golden Glove” would make the protagonist from Lars von Trier’s “The House That Jack Built” turn away.
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