Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is as fine a film as it is a brutally disturbing one. Read full review

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer contrasts the mundane and the domestic with the appalling. The tone doesn't vary at all, and it's not a pretty picture, but movies that burn their images into your consciousness like this one are very, very rare. It is admittedly hard to look, but this is a portrait that demands to be seen. Read full review

Nothing in John McNaughton's script and direction is exploitative; there isn't a frame of wasted action in what may well remain the year's most tightly constructed movie. As such, you're with this qualified classic all the way, you believe in it all the way, and you're thus forced to take its sporadic atrocities seriously. How many movies (and how long has it been since we've seen one) have really pulled this off? [20 April 1990, p.4D]

McNaughton has made a film of clutching terror that's meant to heighten our awareness instead of dulling it. At the end, Henry is still out there among us. And he's no B-movie monster in a hockey mask. He could be the guy next door. This film gives off a dark chill that follows you all the way home. Read full review

It's extremely well-made by a filmmaker who knows what he's doing and doesn't let the limitations of a $100,000 budget get in his way. The photography, acting, editing and use of sound effects and music are quite professional; McNaughton's movie looks and sounds as if it cost much more. It's also genuinely upsetting. Read full review

With its hypnotic performance by Rooker as Henry, it's most terrifying not in its carnage (although that's terrifying enough), but when it forces us to confront our own blinkered passage through the world, our blindness to the closeness of violent death. [5 Jan 1990, p.69]

The film doesn't so much bring us closer to the serial murderer as it reminds us of our culpability as spectators. Read full review

The film uses a slice-of-life approach to create a docudrama of chilling horror. Read full review

Hard-driving, riveting film will be tough for many to take, but Henry – Portrait of a Serial Killer marks the arrival of a major film talent in the person of director, coproducer and cowriter John McNaughton. Read full review

John McNaughton's movie manages to go beyond the disquieting, distressing or even disturbing. It's downright dismaying. Read full review

This intelligent, revolting, artistically made and entirely empty look at a murderer comes close to a cinema of pure technique. It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen. Read full review

While it achieves its goal of being thoroughly unpleasant, Henry could have used a touch more humor (beyond its one knee-slapper about the Chicago Bears). Still, it’s a gruesomely riveting sucker punch of a movie. Read full review

No film in recent memory has tapped into primal, visceral fear as HENRY does, with its vision of a depraved world that seems at once too horrible to exist and too realistic to be denied. Read full review

A spare and authentic screenplay unfolds in an almost documentary-like enviroment, there are no histrionics and the acting is of the highest order, but the film shocks and disturbs as much for its morally questionable purpose as in its ugly subject. Read full review

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is undeniably disturbing, especially that video scene and when it shows us (however discreetly) a body being hacked up in a bathtub. Yet the critics who’ve hailed it as a landmark are going overboard. Henry is just a superior B-movie with an artsy-clinical title. Read full review

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer isn't entirely successful, but it's admirable nonetheless. The film is an honest and disturbing attempt to come to grips with the sort of modern horror that we must - more urgently every day - try to understand. Read full review

This is one mean little movie, fully deserving of some sort of warning badge to keep out the faint of heart and blue of nose. It's not, by any stretch of the imagination, pornography, so disregard the onetime X (the film is being distributed without a rating). But make no mistake: Henry will give you the creeps. [10 August 1990, p.G13]

Director John McNaughton does not shy away from depicting Henry's acts of violence, but he also has not designed it to titillate the bloodthirsty who may get their kicks from ''slasher'' movies. [13 April 1990, p.E3]

McNaughton's film, which has been described as "too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd," is an exercise in revulsion by an often skilled filmmaker. [8 Oct 1990]

The movie rides the very thin line between art and trash, between exploitation and illumination. It's true, certainly, that it takes one into a universe of such moral squalor that one feels tainted afterward. Read full review

McNaughton directs well, and with power, but celebrating murder is a waste of his talents. [17 August 1990, p.3F]

It's precisely Henry's coldblooded affectlessness that is meant to shock and disturb us. But "Henry" leaves us feeling more numbed than moved. Half art film, half schlock-horror cheapie, "Henry" isn't quite sure what it wants to be. Read full review