With his “Zodiac”, David Fincher showed how a modern thriller about serial killers should look like, and when every new film of this genre appears, like it or not, Fincher’s classic serves as something for me to compare. And while in his film he dealt with a killer who terrorized the west coast of America in the sixties and seventies, Matt Ruskin (Crown Heights) dealt with an infamous killer from the east of America in the early sixties. The Boston Strangler entered pop culture a long time ago and he was one of the first known American serial killers and during the sixties he strangled 13 women in Boston and the surrounding area. And stylistically, Ruskin tried to follow “Zodiac” because “Boston Strangler” is also a dark noir thriller in which the task of discovering the identity of the killer, who has been spreading fear for years, was taken over by journalists.
Or rather the journalists, Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knighteley) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), reporters of the Boston Record American who were actually the first to realize that they were dealing with a serial killer. But at the same time, it is also a story about women in what was then a predominantly male business, and the prejudices and problems that Loretta and Jean faced solely because they were women. Thus, we meet Loretta as quite frustrated and desperate because the editor (Chris Cooper) only gives her some silly assignments for the Lifestyle section, and she would like to do serious work. She is nominally supported in this by her husband James (Morgan Spector), who gives the woman full freedom, assuming that it is just her whim and that she will never be a serious journalist, but that at some point she will realize that her house and three children are her priority.
After she manages to be the first to connect some things about the mysterious murders, Loretta will still struggle to follow the case, and she will get a little more experienced Jean to help her. They will constantly be faced with sexism, prejudices, hardly anyone will take them seriously because what can a couple of girls know about police work, even when it turns out that their clues and clues are better than the police’s. Although we get an insight into the danger of the work they do because women are the ones targeted by a maniacal killer, and although “Boston Strangler” is a quality homage to female pioneers of journalism from Boston, the film loses a lot of its focus and dynamics over time.