The Golden Glove (2019)

What makes The Golden Glove special is its fearless commitment to place and mood: Fatih Akin drags you into a nicotine-stained, beer-soaked slice of 1970s Hamburg so vividly you can practically feel the wallpaper sweating. Jonas Dassler disappears into Fritz Honka with a performance that’s both grotesque and weirdly human, aided by astonishing makeup and production design that transform every room and every face into part of the story’s rot. The film’s dark, bitter humor doesn’t soften the horror so much as underline how banal and pathetic evil can look when it’s left to fester in plain sight, and the tight editing keeps the dread from ever turning into spectacle. It’s absolutely not for the squeamish—this is grimy, punishing cinema—but if you can handle the ugliness, you’ll find a meticulously crafted thriller-horror that lingers like a bad smell you can’t quite shake.

The Golden Glove is clearly trying to be a grime-soaked portrait of a real-world monster and the decaying social environment that lets him blend in, not a slick serial-killer thriller. Fatih Akin commits hard to that vision, but the film’s main tool is relentless ugliness—squalor, cruelty, and graphic violence—often to the point where it can feel more punishing than illuminating. If you’re looking for suspense, catharsis, or psychological insight that justifies the endurance test, this may come off as hollow and mean-spirited rather than profound. The upside is that it’s immaculately crafted in its production design and Jonas Dassler’s transformation is disturbingly effective, but it’s absolutely one to skip if you don’t want your evening dominated by misery.