Review: The Golden Glove Is an Exploitation Movie in Search of a Message

Set against a grimy depiction of director Fatih Akin’s native Hamburg, The Golden Glove is based on the true story of serial killer Fritz Honka, who between 1970 and 1975 murdered at least four women, stashing their dismembered and decomposing corpses in his small attic apartment. The film, based on a novelized version of Honka’s story by Heinz Strunk, is intentionally, bracingly ugly, a confrontationally gore-splattered semi-comedy that simultaneously challenges and engages in the trappings of exploitation cinema.

Like Strunk’s novel, Akin’s film is told from the perspective of the killer. Honka (Jonas Dassler) is a grotesque figure, with his deformed nose, bad skin, lazy eye, combover, perpetually sweat-drenched face, and hunched shuffle of a gait. This makes him easy to pick out on the streets, but he’s only one of several distinctively warped outcast caricatures who populate his favorite local bar, The Golden Glove. There, the barkeep goes by the sobriquet of “Anus” and another regular customer is an aged, leather-clad hulk known as Soldaten-Nobert (Dirk Böhling), who as a member of the Waffen-SS no doubt committed crimes just as grisly as Honka’s.

Before Honka’s peculiar countenance—or those of his friends—makes its appearance in The Golden Glove, Akin acquaints us with the body of the man’s first victim, with an extended voyeuristic glance into his bedroom, where we glimpse a woman’s legs, stockings partially rolled down, splayed on a bed. Honka rushes into the shot bearing a plastic bag, into which he clumsily shoves the body. When his dragging of the corpse down the stairs wakes up a neighbor’s young daughter, Honka improvises what will become his trademark solution to hiding the evidence of his crimes: He saws up a victim’s body—depicted in one long take that shows little but implies much—before disposing some of it in a park directly next to his building and storing the remaining pieces in a catwalk adjoining his apartment.

Some of the humor in the film, while it lasts, comes from how unbelievably inept Honka is at serial killing. No cool-minded, methodical genius, the man is an out-of-control loser, driven by rash urges and fueled by hard liquor, his heavy store of which he uses to lure the destitute women who gather at The Golden Glove back to his apartment. In scene after cringe-inducing scene, Honka brings desperate, alcoholic middle-aged women back to the putrescent apartment, gruesomely murders them when they protest his attempted sexual violations or simply talk too much, and then disposes of their bodies in conspicuously lazy fashion.

The Golden Glove spares no punches, at times literally, as we see Honka beat, stab, and abuse his victims, who occasionally fight back but rarely to much avail; at one point, we’re presented with a vengeful application of spicy mustard to Honka’s genitals that feels briefly cathartic. Obsessed by images of women he can’t have, such as teenaged Petra (Greta Sophie Schmidt), with whom he crosses paths one day, Honka is a man whose psyche is depicted with a dark, ironic sense of humor. His fantasies about one victim’s daughter, who works in a butcher shop, provides a humorous glimpse into a distorted (but still recognizable) hetero-male sexuality, with images of Petra rubbing raw meat on her body.

The already inherently uncomfortable humor of the film, though, fades as we’re subjected to explicit long takes of more or less helpless women being brutalized, first sexually and then mortally. There’s an argument to be made that violence should be discomfiting, but the seemingly interminable murder sequences far outlast the onset of disgust, and the film’s intentional ugliness begins to feel hollow. It would be incorrect to peg the film as mere nihilistic exploitation: Given the pointed presence of Soldaten-Nobert and allusions to camps, there are certainly suggestions of a continued authoritarian sickness in German culture, and there are also hints of Akin’s anti-nativist politics in the depiction of the comparatively wholesome (but inexplicably clueless) Greek immigrant family living under Honka. But one wonders whether, to make this point, Akin had to visualize the destruction of so many women.

The aesthetics of The Golden Glove have precedent in German visual culture. For one, you can find similarly grotesque depictions of sexuality and violence in underground comics from around the time Honka went on his killing spree. But above all, the film’s imagery is redolent of artist George Grosz, whose crude sketches depicted sex and violence in a society of skeevy-looking gamblers and plump prostitutes—a world both decadent and broke, an economy both broken and “fixed.” But that’s just it: Grosz’s sketches are leftist social critiques, devoid of prurience and suffused with disgust at exploitation and inequality. The Golden Glove ultimately feels like a version of Grosz’s work but without real commitments. It’s mostly an excuse to stage some unsettling murder scenes in the grimy underbelly of Hamburg.