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Critic Reviews
The TelegraphJan 3, 2020
Season 2 Review:
The series fascinates rather than unsettles. Yet the picture it paints of Manson, Rader and the rest is never glib. It’s a remarkable achievement and one of those rare “binge-watch” shows that lives up to the billing. You really will want to snaffle it down in one sitting.
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ColliderAug 19, 2019
Season 2 Review:
Penhall and Fincher diligently avoided romanticizing or mythologizing [the serial killers], instead exposing the mundane grotesqueries of their pathetic, broken natures—the petty resentments, the self-deception, the delusional narcissism, the sexual and social impotence. Season 2 carries on in the same vein, but with a breathtaking urgency largely missing from the more ambling first season.
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Aug 15, 2019The Daily BeastOct 17, 2017
Oct 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Groff is immediately persuasive as a person whose raw talent is as much a hindrance as an advantage, and Fincher's surgically precise touch is evident in even tiny details like the police bullhorn that distorts a cop's voice to just the right unnerving degree. ... It's never less than engrossing. Fincher's proven time and again that he can make even the most mundane activities and actions riveting.
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Oct 23, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Mindhunter is addictive and resonant for its mining of two evocative forms of social contrast. The terrific cast informs Fincher and creator Joe Penhall's sociological schematic with a human element that's unusual for a crime procedural, and the series has a piercing sense of how macro influences micro culture.
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Oct 13, 2017
Season 1 Review:
It marinates in setup, it stubbornly refuses to tip its hand, it treats its story like Silly Putty that can be stretched and stretched and stretched across something that somebody, somewhere is going to label a “10-hour movie.” But everything enthralling about the first two episodes delves deeper and feels more alive than Netflix also-rans like Ozark and Gypsy, from Fincher leaving his signature on the Kemper interviews to the energetic subtleties of Groff’s performance.
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Uncle BarkyOct 12, 2017
The GuardianDec 3, 2019
Season 2 Review:
Mindhunter gets out of sleuth-cliche jail through our fascination with the real cases it dramatises: those who have devoured the BTK and Atlanta cases via true-crime podcasts and Wikipedia binges ought to appreciate the lurid creepiness of the former and the elusive oddness of the latter. It’s all a quality guilty thrill.
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Aug 28, 2019
Season 2 Review:
The show’s narrative is more cohesive this season, too. The team is driven to collect more data from the killers because the so-called Atlanta Child Murders are unfolding and they want to help out with their newfangled profiling. It’s all very, very dark, which for me is very, very intriguing.
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Aug 20, 2019The Daily BeastAug 19, 2019
Season 2 Review:
The soul-crushing dread that comes from looking into an abyss and realizing that you may never comprehend its nature is vividly felt in the performances of Groff, Torv and especially McCallany, who is phenomenal as a morally upright man struggling to maintain his composure, and sanity, in the face of unspeakable inequity. It’s an endeavor that, in season two, only grows more difficult, as threats emerge around every corner—and outside every unlocked back door.
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Dec 15, 2017
Season 1 Review:
“All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.” The writers (led by Penhall) and the directors (who include David Fincher) of “Mindhunter” play with this and related ideas about masks, frames, screens, and true selves in a distinct tone. As the show flows from mode to mode--slow-burn horror, arch workplace comedy, buddy-cop road movie--it returns its attention to performers, and to the daily problem of giving an audience what it wants.
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Oct 20, 2017
Season 1 Review:
It’s a head trip, a cerebral consideration of all the terrifying things that can go wrong inside the minds of murderers and men. ... Mindhunter locates its drama in interrogations. The show is, in essence, a string of short plays, two- and three-handers featuring Ford, Tench, and a vile murderer in a room.
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Oct 19, 2017
Season 1 Review:
There’s not much suspense or any thrill of discovery as we watch Holden and Bill slowly tumble to the patterns in serial-killer methodology. ... That said, Mindhunter is engrossing, and the central performances by Groff and McCallany are highly distinctive and complementary. The whole production has an assurance that’s comforting in the midst of all the unsettling time we spend with depraved law-breakers.
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UPROXXOct 17, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Penhall, Fincher, and the rest of the creative team take a dry, no-frills approach to most of the narrative. The overall aesthetic isn’t flashy, but that’s the point--this is exhausting, sad work involving both victims and perpetrators who led small lives that have become shockingly big--and the drama is more potent because of how plain-spoken so much of this is.
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Oct 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The two Mindhunter episodes provided to critics have more going for them than mere atmosphere, largely thanks to robust performances by Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany, who embody the familiar rookie and veteran cop partnership with a taut crackle. Together and individually these actors elevate dialogue that comes across as contrived and stilted, particularly in the first episode.
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TV Guide MagazineOct 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
An unusually cerebral and chillingly absorbing drama. [16-29 Oct 2017, p.15]
Aug 16, 2019
Season 2 Review:
When it finally gets going — and that would be Episode 3 — Season 2 of the Netflix series “Mindhunter” finds some resonance by delving into one of the most notorious 20th-century serial killer cases — the Atlanta child murders of 1979-81. At least 28 children, adolescents, and adults were killed.
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Aug 19, 2019
Season 2 Review:
The series continues to look amazing and feel unnerving throughout. But if we keep following this story deeper into the techniques that Ford, Tench, and Carr are developing, Mindhunter is eventually going to land in the same narrative territory already covered extensively by all the movies and TV shows inspired by the real version of this work. While it mostly hangs together for now, there are already more signs of strain than there were back in 2017.
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Oct 16, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Mindhunter is not, by any means, a perfect show, nor does it succeed at everything it sets out to accomplish. But its intense focus on the inner workings of the human brain makes for a surprisingly fascinating watch that examines the roots of human darkness without seeming to revel in it.
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Oct 13, 2017
Season 1 Review:
What Mindhunter lacks in energy it makes up for in better attention to character details. Mindhunter grows significantly more interesting in its second hour once Holden gets paired with veteran FBI agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany, “Lights Out”) and starts interviewing co-ed killer Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton, who nails a so-serene-it’s-creepy vibe).
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Oct 13, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Mindhunter’s dialogue can also be overly stiff and theatrical, perhaps because its showrunner, the playwright Joe Penhall, and its writer, Jennifer Haley, have both predominantly worked in theater. ... The show’s at its most absorbing when it’s spending time with monsters.
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Oct 13, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Netflix has made only two episodes available for review, and both are compromised by the unsubtle plot and character setups found in most TV pilots. Still, they promise a tense, beautifully filmed series, one that, given the popularity of serial killer shows including “Criminal Minds,” “The Fall,” “Hannibal,” and even “Dexter,” will likely catch on.
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Oct 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Mindhunter, whose first season appears Friday, is more academic than sensationalistic, at least in the two episodes made available to critics. ... Still, the series’ linking of irrational times and unspeakable acts resonates with today’s stories of mass shootings and a widening gyre of chaos in the headlines.
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Oct 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Although scenes are strung together a bit casually, they are lavishly filmed, meticulously directed and scored. Groff and McCallany are well-cast, and Groff has an air of innocence and naiveté that makes his goody-goody character work. But overall, the series lacks sharpness. The first two episodes feel almost deliberately incomplete, begging for something bigger to arrive.
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Oct 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The show struggles to make Holden make sense--which makes for a slow, rocky start through his career woes and love life. Though the pilot’s tone is an intriguing combination of wry humor and ‘70s noir, it’s otherwise a slog of exposition and painfully on-the-nose scene-setting. Things pick up considerably as soon as McCallany’s Bill appears in Holden’s life.
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