Relationships between children and parents can often go through periods of turbulence. Rebellious years, growing pains, suspecting that your father is a serial killer. All of these things can cause some strain. That last issue may be a rare thing indeed, but it is what the lead character here ends up dealing with.
Charlie Plummer is Tyler, a well-behaved young man who tries to stay on his best behaviour around his parents (Samantha Mathis and Dylan McDermott). His worst behaviour is sneaking out with his dad’s truck to meet a date. Which starts off a horrible chain of events, all because a small pornographic photo is found in the truck. This piques Tyler’s curiosity about the local deaths caused by “the clovehitch killer” (someone so named because of their favoured knot). Tyler teams up with Kassi (Madisen Beaty), a young woman who is slightly obsessed with the case, despite the fact that no murders have been committed in years. Things soon get more worrying when evidence starts to point to Tyler’s dad as the main suspect.
Boosted considerably by the pairing of a great cast doing some of their best work and a finely-tuned script by Christopher Ford, The Clovehitch Killer is a great slow-burn thriller that sits nicely right in between the believable and the . . . cinematically believable (so not too believable, but there's enough done to help you enjoy and believe it all while things are playing out). Director Duncan Skiles allows everything to be sold by the acting and the structure of the screenplay, and knows when to show more and when to keep things hidden away. Things seem very obvious at certain points, but the twists and turns are all done in a way that allow you to consider how the characters may still find certain things plausible, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Plummer is an excellent young lead, very believable as he starts to lean into some behaviours that his parents would frown upon in his quest to get to a truth he may not really want to accept. Beaty is a great co-star alongside him, a teenager who happily treads her own path, and someone with a very understandable reason for digging deeper into the case of "the clovehitch killer". Mathis and McDermott are both just as good as the younger cast members, and McDermott gives a performance that easily ranks up there with anything else he's done over the years. He's almost unrecognisable at times, and every interaction he has with his family members, and particularly his son, is played absolutely perfectly.
It's a film with very few surprises, and one that could have been made as a short with some adjustments, but this is one of many movies about the journey, rather than the destination. And that journey is a hugely satisfying one, thanks to the efforts of everyone involved. Not flashy, not gory, not exploitative, what you have is simply the result of a group of talented people who all have faith in the material that they're working with. And the end result shows that they were right to have that faith.
8/10
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