Der goldene Handschuh

The action of this excellent film revolves in the 70s around « Zum Goldene Handschuh », a shabby bar with an ultra-rough reputation in the suburbs of Hamburg, frequented by prostitutes as old as ugly, drinking Schnapps as I drink water during a heat wave, ... and Fritz Honka, a particularly barbaric serial killer and excellently interpreted by Jonas Dassler. The atmosphere is sordid at will, the characters are pathetic and the plot twists are barbaric. Sensitive souls should abstain!

I do not really understand the manifold comparisons with the film The House That Jack Built (2018). Although the film is about a serial killer, in my humble opinion, the analogy stops right there. Indeed, although this film takes place in Germany in the 70s, I often had the impression to read a bleak and dark book of French literature of the 19th century, such as La maison Tellier (Guy de Maupassant, 1881), Nana (Émile Zola, 1880) or Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862). Moreover, apart from this literary comparison, I also recognized a few scenes from the well-known Belgian movie C'est arrivé près de chez vous (1992), especially the early-morning scene during which we discover higgledy-piggledy corpses in a kitchen, after a naughty sexual orgy.

As a synthesis: desperately dark and disturbingly violent.