Writer-director Matt Ruskin’s Boston Strangler introduces viewers to Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley) inside the Boston Record American’s newsroom amid clattering typewriters and cigarette smoke. It’s the late 1960s, and much to Loretta’s frustration, the paper’s female employees are by and large tasked with reviewing household products, while the hard news is handed to the men. So when she notices that a string of recent murders in the city all have certain details in common—like the stockings tied in a bow around each victim’s neck—Loretta sees her chance to break open the boys club and do some real reporting.
After seeking out the help of the one female colleague, Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), who’s managed to make a crack in the glass ceiling before her, Loretta begins piecing together the story of the man she will famously dub the Boston Strangler. It turns out, Jean and Loretta make a great team. Loretta is all bull-headed ambition while Jean is a little more seasoned and more cynical. Whether it’s cops, editors, or politicians, Jean knows who to talk to and how to talk to them to get a straight answer. Loretta doesn’t navigate things quite as savvily, but the sheer doggedness with which she pursues every question makes her almost impossible to stop.
The film will inevitably draw comparison to David Fincher’s crime dramas, given its cold color palette and frames filled with deep shadows. This is a story about people who live their lives in the dark spaces where bad things happen. Loretta never seems to see the sun, either chasing down leads in dank barrooms or typing up stories in the searing, artificial brightness of the office. She never arrives home in time to have dinner with her family, picking over leftovers by the refrigerator’s glow. In the few instances where daylight is glimpsed in the film, it’s made to appear almost blinding, as if Loretta has become a stranger to the light of the day.
As more victims are found, a number of suspects are identified, with David Dastmalchian bringing his uniquely unsettling energy to the most likely offender, Albert DeSalvo. But, as in Fincher’s Zodiac, the longer the case is pursued, the more unclear the truth of it all becomes, and if nothing else, Loretta and Jean’s frustrated sleuthing leaves a purposeful impression, because as the chyron at the end of the film reminds us, the Boston Stranger case is unsolved.
Much of Ruskin’s film revolves around Loretta being denied easy access to everything from crime scenes to documents. Indeed, her whole life quickly comes to be defined by her frustration over these denials, which is shared by her progressive and sympathetic (but only up to a point) husband, James (Morgan Spector). Loretta increasingly throws her whole weight against each barrier that’s placed before her, in the hope of somehow breaking through. This serves as a casually chilling counterpoint to one other connection between the Boston Stranger murders: that the killer never had to force his way into his victim’s homes.
In such moments, Boston Strangler brushes up against a greater truth about how men and women move through the world. It threatens to connect the dots between the killer’s misogynistic brutality and the patriarchal power systems that allowed him to operate. But for the most part, Ruskin’s film is content just to follow the facts of how the case was broken, making for a very functional tale that doesn’t leave viewers with much to chew on after that chyron tells them what they may already know about this infamous case.
And that feels like a missed opportunity. This is a story, after all, about a man—or, possibly, multiple men—who committed brutal acts against women who were being failed by the institutions that were supposed to protect them. It’s a tale about true crime itself, the way we sensationalize and mythologize serial killers, and how whole careers get built on the savage deaths of innocent people. And, of course, it’s a tale about inexplicable bloodlust.
Zodiac is about the elusiveness of truth and the dangers of obsession, while Fincher’s earlier Se7en is a rumination on evil, and it’s those deeper layers that make them great crime films. By contrast, while Boston Strangler’s determination to spotlight the women who brought down DeSalvo over the killer himself is admirable, it leaves a hole in the middle of the film that nothing else really manages to fill. We don’t get all that deep into Loretta’s life or what her investigation meant to her and her family. The film is engaging as a chronicle of her reportage taking shape, but it never gives full expression to what it meant for her to break the glass ceiling.
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