Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer | Film Review

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer ***½

by Jeremiah Kipp on September 7, 2005 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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When movies turn serial killers into pop icons, they trivialize not only the idea of murder but also of monsters. Once we can quantify a monster as representing evil, we distance ourselves from it and pat ourselves on the back for being good. But are those monstrous qualities that far away from us? Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer doesn't so much bring us closer to the serial murderer—it reminds us of our culpability as spectators. Rather than the vicarious thrills of a hack n' slash thriller, Henry rubs our noses in the lack of empathy required to do harm to others. If we are to call that evil, it is the absence of a conscience—the lack of foresight to see that one is doing harm. No doubt, that realization would be shattering—but the character of Henry is never given that insight, or catharsis. That's hopefully what separates him from us.

No doubt, the low budget contributed to the spare minimalist look of Henry, whose flat lighting schemes and naturalistic Chicago setting ground this brutal endeavor in reality. As played by Michael Rooker in his breakthrough role, Henry is a shambling, quiet, soft-spoken loner with a warped sense of integrity. He speaks about killing as if it were his God-given right, unquestioning and sincere. This charismatic sense of self attracts Becky (Tracy Arnold), the sister of Henry's dim-witted ex-convict friend Otis (Tom Towles). Even as the audience hopes her sincere, if misguided, attraction to Henry will lead him down a path of redemption, the road the film travels is so rigorously downbeat one quickly gets the sense there's no hope.

The opening sequence details Henry's sojourns into coffee shops and shopping malls, driving around the slushy winter streets of Chicago, intercut with lingering "still life" images of the corpses he's left in his wake. But it's a deranged parody of art; the bodies are presented in their full and unadorned, wretched lifelessness. When Henry moves in with Otis and Becky, we've been given a full understanding of what he's capable of—yet when Henry delivers his confessional to Becky about how he killed his mother it arouses pathos. A foolish pathos, as it turns out. One quickly picks up on Henry's inability to sort truth from memory—he starts off claiming that he shot his mother, then claims he stabbed her, and when Becky calls him on it all he can do is mutter, "Yeah, that's right. I shot her."

As Henry brings on Otis as his gleeful accomplice, Henry starts building compelling scenes about the viewer's relationship to violence: the obnoxious stolen TV-salesman "deserves" to be killed because he's rude, whereas later in the film the husband, wife, and child killed during a home invasion "don't deserve it" because they're presented as more sympathetic. As director John McNaughton notes in his commentary, "You start asking yourself why you're watching this." Indeed, Henry could be taken as a feel-bad creep show about bad men and their unfortunate victims. But it has something more revealing as its theme, I think: our desire to see only the perceived best parts in ourselves—and our inability to see when we are destroying those around us. As an emotional map, Henry is decidedly raw, personal, and unrelenting.

Director(s): John McNaughton
Screenplay: Richard Fire, John McNaughton
Cast: Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, Tom Towles
Distributor: Greycat Films
Runtime: 83 min.
Rating: NC-17
Year: 1986