Boston Strangler (2023)

Boston Strangler arrives as a study in restraint, which is a polite way of saying it declines to grab anyone by the collar. Matt Ruskin's film follows Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole as they chase a serial killer through the newsroom of the Boston Record American, and it understands that the more interesting crime scene is the office. The picture's engine is not the strangler at all. It is two women being told, repeatedly and without ceremony, that their work matters less than the men who supervise it. Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon carry the load with a clipped, weary competence, and the film earns its standing on that front alone. The supporting cast is white to a man, a fact of the 1960s Boston setting and also a fact of the casting.

Where the film reaches for something larger, it does so with gloved hands. The third act advances the theory that Albert DeSalvo confessed to crimes he did not commit so that George Nassar could collect reward money, with a book deal dangled as bait. This is a genuine historical argument, not an invention, and the film treats it as such. The critique of greed here aims at individuals, at lawyers and hucksters and newspapers selling copies, not at any system. The film has no interest in the machinery beneath the men.

On the question of sermonizing, the film is cautious to a fault. Reviewers noted the gentle jabs at period sexism, editors adding the women's photographs to their bylines to move papers, and observed that the whole affair stays on the right side of contemporary taste. That is a compliment and a criticism in the same breath. There is no lecture here, only a raised eyebrow. The result is a competent, slightly airless procedural that honors two journalists without ever raising its voice. A sommelier might call it correct. A drinker would call it thin.