(SOME SPOILERS) Serial killer on the loose in the north country using the six month winter darkness as a cover for his unspeakable crimes.
With two drunken hunters Levi & Buffalo, Philip Granger & Ernst Harth, stumbling on the frozen body of Lucy Waters,Jennifer Martinez, it becomes evident later at the towns coroners office that she's been murdered. The chief of police of the little northern Alaskan town of Revelstoke Vance Corgan, Jeremy Ratchford, is then put on the case.
We almost seem to know who the killer is by seeing the towns barber Dexter Miles, Malcolm McDowell, talking to his customer about killing someone that you love and how difficult it is to do it face to face, like Lucy was murdered by strangulation, then with a gun at a safe distance away. Our suspicions about Miles being the killer is later confirmed when he spends the next evening at the home of the waitress Sally, Brenda James, of Revelstoke's rowdy Liquor Pig bar, Sally's later found murdered the exact same way that Lucy was.
Miles begins to become suspicious to the police finding him out when FBI Agent Crawley, Sarwin Sanford, and later his fellow agent Sedwick, Vince Murdocco, comes on the scene knowing that they, the FBI, are tracking Miles' previous murders on the Pacific West Coast, that number about 50. These murderers are very similar to the killings Miles is involved with up here in Alaska.
With the prime suspect in Lucy's murder, Hawkins, found murdered himself in a hotel room in North Pole Alaska almost every male in Revelstoke, including Chief Corgan, is a potential suspect in her murder. Lucy had sexual relations with almost every man in town and they all had reasons to kill her to keep her from outing them .At the same time the FBI seemed to have overlooked the fact that Lucy was found to have been raped but the rapist, according to the postmortem report, was sterile which eliminated almost everyone of Lucy's lovers but Dexter Miles!
The film "The Barber" has Miles one step ahead of the police during the entire movie using the cover of night to get away with his crimes. Miles seems so sure of himself that he makes no effort to distance himself from the killings like admitting that he was in the small town of North Pole the day that Hawkins was last seen alive there. Miles also doesn't seem to care that he was seen with the victims at Revelstoke just hours before they were found murdered.
Setting up Chief Corgan, by somehow planting DNA evidence, to implicate him in the deaths of Lucy Sally and later his secretary at the police station Jewels, Erin Wright, Miles has it all wrapped for the FBI to arrest the towns police chief who the FBI agent had thrown off the case because, of what they considered, his incompetence. Miles makes one major mistake he leaves a fingerprint on a beer mug that he gave Corgan as a Christmas present that matches one of his at the Jewels murder scene.
Too gimmickry for my taste with Miles always a step ahead, or having fate or luck on his side, of the police and FBI to the point that the film comes across as if it wan't him to get away with murder. The movie tries to show it's audience how a psychopath, like Miles, has superhuman intelligence and unbelievable luck to prove it's point.
Yes psycho killers are smart cunning and devious besides being extremely dangerous. A psycho killer can be someone that his friends and acquaintances my know very well, like a Dexter Miles, but will never suspect him in a million years but in reality most Psycho killers, unlike Dexter Miles, end up getting caught.
