As being endowed with intellect and morality, we can see our own life choices from all sides, which sometimes requires confrontation with our own darkness. Most of the time we exclude and ignore this darkness, but there are (genius) individuals who bravely dive into the darkness of our minds and grasp the imagination of it's fortune.
And if something has to be admitted to our species, it's how much twisted we can become.
One of these geniuses is David Fincher, who presented several shades of human darkness in his successes, Se7en, Fight Club, Gone Girl and The Social Network.
In the new Netflix series, Mindhunter Fincher joined Joe Penhall, Andrew Douglas, Asif Kapadi and Tobias Lindholm as co-workers to create a story about the beginning of criminal profiling.
Before Will Graham and the minds in Criminal Minds that fictitiously enter the psychology of the killer, there was John E. Douglas whose book Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit was taken as the basis for this story. The premise of the series is that sometimes in America there was no reason to try to understand the crimes of the perpetrators because their motives were clear. The murderer was found, locked up forever, and the public could continue to relax.
However, there was a time when the killers began to operate seemingly inexplicable. Here on the scene comes psychology, whose role in solving complex cases has already been used many times, but this role was initially challenged. Thanks to Douglas's work with serial killers at a time when a serial killer was not even a term, today we not only have criminal profiling, but, more importantly, we have an entire database of fantastic characters in the world of criminal genre.
Mindhunter's first scene shows us Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), an FBI agent in the middle of a hostage crisis, trying to save both hostages and the main culprit. In this scene we immediately get a very clear description of Holden - he refuses any help from those around him (in the simple gesture of refusing the offered megaphone), he likes to control the situation and is brave, which is due to several raised eyebrows. After seeing the Dog Day Afternoon in the cinema, he realizes he is sympathetic to Al Pacino who desperately yells "Attica!" Attica! Attica!"
Holden decides to use his empathy on the notorious criminals of his time. Holden realizes that if they can understand why the murderers killed and why they killed them the way they killed, it is possible that in the future they will be able to prevent new crimes. It turns out that this is quite a long and high goal, but he quickly realizes that he can use its discoveries in search of more killers on to loose.
Holden is joining forces with Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), another agent, and psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) to interview serial killers and create a form of profiling for criminals. The series doesn't stay on, but offers us two more narrative lines, one in which Holden and Bill deal with the killings they encounter in their training tour of US policemen, and the one that follows the intimacy of the three protagonists.
Mindhunter starts as a fairly jolly view of everyday life of two FBI agents. Holden and Bill travel from America to their base at Quantico in Virginia and share their knowledge with "ordinary" policemen. But on the way they come to an idea of questioning the notorious criminals, at first Holden himself, and then with Bill's escort. Each of their "subjects" is interesting in its own way; The series starts with Edmund Kemper in the freaky performance of Cameron Britton. The decision by the creative team to take on unknown killers for their characters definitely paid off - we got the free cargo of name and expectation, and all of them are excellent.
Although Britton is absolutely brilliant as a multiple murderer Kemper with a perverted sense of justice, other "subjects" are not far behind him. It is precisely because of their languidness or reservedness, the series can safely sail on a minimum amount of frenzied scenes of murders and corrosive bodies. There are, of course, but not as striking as detailed descriptions of murders from the mouth of the perpetrators themselves, further enhanced by their personal philosophies, feelings and memories. That's the freshness of the series it seems to have been filmed a thousand times.
Although it begins as a three-layer story, Mindhunter slowly, but surely prefers a narrative line of questioning of serial killers, reflecting the prevailing nature of that task in Holden's life. So we are following the slow, but sure fall of the action and the characters in madness. The series itself is one of those slow and seemingly gentle giants that actually give the most striking blows and for which persistence certainly pays off.
One of the main backbones is the fight for control. Everybody is trying to control the situation and manipulate the outcome, and at the same time try to avoid the consequences. So we get a dual study - the examiners explicitly study the killers, and the viewers with a pause can simultaneously study both the examiners and the killers. The characters are completely built, they can be understood, which means that the third narrative line-personal life of the agents, works very well. However, if this series has a weak link, then it's in the image of Debbie (Hannah Gross), Holden's girlfriend. Debbie could also be an inflatable doll, because her only purpose is to hold Holden's exhaust valve (both sexually and emotionally). She is shown as a stand-alone intellectual, but she doesn't exist without Holden, which is a disadvantage.
As it often happens, the soundtrack is one of the essential vertices of this series. The selection of songs is not only important for determining the tone, but it also follows the story substantially. It's no coincidence, but also comical that Fincher's second episode, in which we meet Kemper, ends with the song Psycho Killer, and the whole series draws on such subtle choices of songs.
This was my translation from Croatian to English from Ziher hr article ''Ljudski um je pokvarljiva roba: Mindhunter'' by I.Kolar