Rating: 4/5 stars
In 2012, Netflix’s video streaming was still relatively new and DVD by mail was the lion’s share of the business. A year later, Netflix started creating its own original programming with the first season of “House of Cards.” The years since have seen the company explode in popularity, and Netflix drastically has changed the landscape in which we consume TV and movies. David Fincher (“Fight Club”) can certainly be credited as part of Netflix’s success as he got the ball rolling as director and executive producer of the “House of Cards” brilliant pilot episode. Seven years later, he returns to the streaming giant to lend his unique cinematic style to one of Netflix’s best new shows, “Mindhunter.”
Set in the late 1970s, “Mindhunter” follows the early days of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit as they interview convicted serial killers, before people knew them as such, and try to research why they do the things they do in order to develop a methodology and stop more crimes before they happen. Viewers follow the young and eager Special Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff, “Frozen”) and his grizzled, older partner Bill Tench (Holt McCallany, “Shot Caller”) as they tour the country interviewing these murderers, teaching their findings to local police departments and making the occasional detour to help solve a case.
After the first scene of the series, it is easy to worry that “Mindhunter” will be just another lurid, sensationalized depiction of America’s obsession with serial killers. However, the show displays great restraint in showing audiences these awful acts (besides a few quick glimpses at crime scene photos), and instead lets the killers tell the detectives about what they have done and why, which allows the viewers’ minds to fill in the blanks.
Each of the killers interviewed are unsettling in their own special way, but Ed Kemper’s (Cameron Britton, “Stitchers”) interviews with the detectives is the show at its creepiest. In these scenes, the viewer is both incredibly captivated and repulsed in a way that makes it hard to watch but impossible to look away. Britton’s performance is the highlight of the entire season, eliciting almost the same feeling as watching Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs” for the first time. Groff also gives a memorable performance as the troubled lead detective, Holden Ford. Audiences will be as unnerved watching how quickly he forms a rapport with the killers as his colleagues are in the show.
As much as it is about serial killers, for most of its 10-hour runtime, “Mindhunter” feels more like a high-quality workplace drama than a true crime procedural. At its best, the writing feels almost Sorkin-esque, and with Fincher’s distinct camera movements and cinematography, the show is really firing on all cylinders, and it is easy to forget you are not watching a 1970s FBI-themed “The Social Network.” The writing stays at a high level for most of the show, but has a tendency to overindulge in exposition. A scene in the penultimate episode where the team comes up with the term “serial killer” is so silly in its hand holding that it takes the wind out of the show’s sails for a few minutes.
“Mindhunter” feels like what a second season of HBO’s “True Detective” should have been. While it never quite reaches the heights of the first season of that HBO miniseries, “Mindhunter” is an enthralling character study about its detectives, the men they interview, and the colleagues and girlfriends that must deal with the fallout of their actions.
