There comes a moment in everybody’s life when you realize your parents aren’t perfect. It’s generally the result of a pretty benign incident—you might catch your dad lying to a friend or overhear your mom casually flirting with a barista—but it can be a crystallizing experience, the kind of emotional benchmark you return to in times of disillusion for the rest of your life. The Clovehitch Killer, a tense and finely-spun thriller filtered through the confused and precarious lens of adolescence, pushes such an anxiety to the extreme, but it barely breaks a sweat in the process. A sort of domestic horror story, the film breathes life into a nightmarish premise—what if my dad is the notorious serial killer who terrorized my town?—with slow and steady precision. There aren’t a lot of twists in the script, and it isn’t much of a mystery, but the film isn’t concerned with anyone guessing how it ends, even if they end up right. It’s all about twisting the knife while confirming some of the darkest fears imaginable.
The story unfolds in a small Kentucky town where a series of brutal sex murders have loomed over residents for a decade. The Clovehitch Killer, named after the intricate knots he left behind as calling cards, abruptly ended his spree with 10 victims, leaving the conservative community to handle the situation like any other conservative community would: by sweeping it under the rug and carrying on like normal. Christopher Ford’s script takes aim at the implicit strangeness of Middle American conformity, providing a sort of Lynchian baseline for director Duncan Skiles’ cerebral, David Fincher-esque approach. The setting almost has a ‘90s vibe, but the presence of technology and contemporary references firmly places it in the “now,” suggesting that the unnamed town and the central characters are trying to keep things at bay, but as the film perhaps too bluntly points out, things don’t stay hidden forever.
Charlie Plummer (Lean on Pete, All the Money in the World) plays Tyler Burnside, a devout Christian and dedicated Boy Scout in a troop led by his equally devout and equally dedicated father, Don (Dylan McDermott). Early in the film, Tyler swipes the keys to his dad’s pickup and meets a girl for a midnight rendezvous. Tyler’s innate understanding that Christianity is only worthwhile when people are actively looking at him likely came from good old dad, because before his tryst can really get started, his date finds a crumbled up magazine photo of a nude woman between the seats. She’s deeply appalled, and Tyler is mightily confused. As she goes around town telling people that he’s a sick pervert, Tyler starts snooping around his father’s toolshed, where he unearths a shoebox full of disturbing bondage porn and a polaroid photo of a bound and bloody woman that couldn’t possibly have come from a magazine.
The film finds symbolic meaning in this discovery, showing us the way dark and disturbing things often lurk under the cover of convention. It’s a familiar and well-trodden theme, but Skiles wisely avoids drawing things out. From this moment on, there’s no question Don is the Clovehitch Killer. There isn’t any ambiguous tension here, although there are a number of contrived narrative missteps that nearly knock things off course, including the ostracized Tyler’s newfound friendship with local “weird girl” Kassi (Madisen Beaty), a true crime obsessive intent on solving the Clovehitch cold case herself. When Skiles and Ford finally reveal her true background—the closest thing the film has to a “gotcha!” moment—there hasn’t been enough emotional investment to make it feel like a payoff. The film is much better at conveying the acute dread and anxiety of what it might feel like to discover that your beloved father is actually a sex-crazed murderer, right down to the wall of denial Tyler builds to ward off the horrifying evidence that continues piling up. And by making it clear early on that Don is not only guilty, but also aware that Tyler is snooping around, Skiles and Ford lend innocuous activities—a family dinner, a camping trip—agonizing underpinnings of suspense and potential violence.
Things pivot drastically about halfway through the film when our perspective switches from Tyler to Don during a weekend when the rest of the family is out of town. After a situation that entwines father and son in a way neither of them ever expected, Don’s urge to kill comes rushing back, and we see him partake in a series of troubling rituals that seem to either push it away or welcome it further. Another narrative digression follows suit—one that unites Tyler and Don’s journeys in harrowing, pulse-pounding fashion—and the plot structure nearly bottoms out, but Skiles creates a sort of macabre intrigue in Don’s deviant behavior. During these stretches, it helps to have an understanding of Dennis “BTK” Rader, the actual serial killer that inspired Don’s creation. (Ford has admitted to being in the middle of a true crime phase while writing the script). Not only does it bring the character’s disturbing behavior into sharper focus, it helps fill in certain plot holes that plague the back half of the film, like why Don ended his spree and why he feels compelled to keep evidence of his crimes in secret caches hidden throughout the house. Of course, the story doesn’t require the audience to be familiar with the BTK case, and it’s possible to enjoy the film without knowing the real-life details, but having that particular awareness only plays into the film’s favor: If you think this kind of thing can only happen in the movies, think again.
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