Golden Glove

The Golden Glove

Altin Eldiven
Directed by Faith Akin
Germany | 2019 | Narrative
115 minutes | German & Greek

Acclaimed filmmaker Fatih Akin (“Head-On,” “The Edge of Heaven,” “In the Fade”) offers a pitch-black horror film — based on a true story — set in the grimiest, least savory quarters of 1970s Hamburg. At first glance, Fritz (Fiete) Honka is a pitiful loser: The man with the broken face carouses through his nights in a red-light-district dive, the Golden Glove, chasing after lonely women. As his fellow bar hounds tear up over schmaltzy German songs and drink copiously to dull their pain and longing, none of the regulars suspects that the apparently harmless Fiete is actually a monster: a murderer who preys on middle-aged women. Calling the film “a profound portrait of a serial killer,” the film site Birth.Movies.Death writes: “Fatih Akin's latest film explores this exceptionally dark and dank corner of society, eschewing the seemingly unavoidable sexiness of the true crime genre to tell an appropriately depraved, visceral, and deeply unsettling story the way it should be told.”