Disc Reviews

I Am Not a Serial Killer Blu-ray Review

• 17th Feb 2017

I am Not a Serial Killer is a dark and highly original take on the serial killer genre. It is offbeat to say the least. Appropriately it is set in a small Minnesota town in the depths of winter (Christmas time in fact), but unlike many American films it does not look very Christmassy. This might seem like a minor detail but goes someway to highlight the isolation of this small town. The film is based off the youth targeted novel by Dan Wells of the same title and was the first part of a trilogy of books known as the ‘John Wayne Cleaver Trilogy’.

The hero, or principle character of the film is 16-year-old John Wayne Cleaver who lives with his single mother and helps her out working part-time in the mortuary she runs. John has been diagnosed as a sociopath and is seeing a psychiatrist who helps him put some measures in place in order that he is not dangerous and is able to control his anxieties or his suppress impulses to do others harm. He shows signs of his sociopathic behaviour in what his mother sees as his unnatural interest in corpses in the mortuary and his inability to connect with a fellow high school student of the opposite sex who is clearly interested in him. He also addresses a bully at the school with some elan, telling the bully that due to his condition he is nothing to him, no more than a cardboard box. Meanwhile, in the town there have been a spate of murders, seemingly by a serial killer who takes organs from the victims. The film opens with the discovery of another murder and next to the mutilated corpse as usual there is a slick of tar like oil. John is interested in the case and even does background research at the school library. His curiosity is aroused by a stranger in the town and follows him when he is given a lift to a frozen fishing lake by an elderly neighbour, Mr. Crowley (Christopher Lloyd). John watches from a distance when he is shocked at seeing Mr. Crowley murder the man and mutilate his body, taking out his heart. John now tries to uncover or stop his neighbour while also maintaining a relationship with him.

The intelligence of this film lies in the thrust of the story, notably John’s sociopathic behaviour and how stopping Mr. Crowley will help prove that John is really not that disconnected from other people. The film is directed by the young Irish director, Billy O’Brien. O’Brien had previously made the Irish horror, Isolation (2014) and in this film, an Irish-British co-production the director filmed in Minnesota (although there is not necessarily a particularly European sensibility to it). O’Brien always had in mind 17-year-old Max Records to play John Wayne Cleaver. On a series of extras on the disc there are trial shots showing the then 14-year-old Records enacting some test scenes and Records feels every bit a star in the making with his wide eyed youthful edginess. A clearly elderly Lloyd is also great and is equally bland and sinister in the roll of the neighbour.

Without giving too much away the film takes a significant gear shift near the end and goes into horror mode as the explanation for the tar like oil by the corpses becomes clear. Throughout the film has a very ‘indie’ feel to it from its moody setting and moody characters to its pace. It also has a Lynchian kind of messianic darkness to it that recalls Blue Velvet (1986). Beautifully lit in chiaroscuro and muted tones on 16mm film this adds to the moodiness of the film. O’Brien clearly understands how to  create a disquieting scene. The scene in which John is searching Crawley’s house while he is out and his wife is asleep in bed is unsettling in its banality. The scene is akin to Jodie Foster’s Agent Starling in Silence of the Lambs (1990) or even Nicolas Cage as the private investigator in 8mm (1998) where places of normal lives become sinister and what the Germans call unheimlich (which in German can mean both unhomely and uncanny). O’Brien shows some talent working in the genre and I for one will look forward to more films from this director.

Chris Hick