The Clovehitch Killer (2018)

There is a particular fatigue that settles over the working critic when a film arrives carrying no agenda whatsoever. The Clovehitch Killer is a 2018 coming-of-age thriller set in rural Kentucky, where a sixteen-year-old boy named Tyler discovers bondage photographs in his father's truck and slowly concludes that the community's most beloved family man may be the serial killer who strangled ten women a decade earlier. The cast is uniformly white, which the film's setting renders unremarkable, and no color-conscious hand appears anywhere in the frame. Race simply does not exist as a subject here. Neither does climate, nor class, nor any economic grievance. This is a domestic psychological horror story about a boy and his dad, and it declines every invitation to become something larger.

The women in the film fare poorly in thematic terms. Kassi, an outcast amateur historian of the killings, functions as a capable co-investigator and eventually saves the day with a well-placed blow to the head, which earns the picture a modest nod toward female agency. But the victims themselves are staged as bound, beaten set dressing, photographed for our discomfort and then discarded. The killer's crossdressing is handled as fetishistic pathology, a symptom of his sickness, never as identity, so no queer reading survives contact with the text. The vegetative uncle exists to provide a false alibi, not to illuminate the lives of disabled people.

What remains is craft. The film is patient, moody, and admirably restrained, building dread through sterile suburban interiors and the suffocating politeness of church life. It lectures no one. It sermonizes about nothing. Stephen King called it unbearable, which is praise of the right kind. We are left with a well-made thriller that wants only to unsettle us, and in that narrow ambition it succeeds, leaving the cultural ledger conspicuously blank.