Mindhunter

Mindhunter explores grotesquerie, but the effect is good-humored. Here at the supernova-birth of modern evil, David Fincher has chilled out.

The result is a worthy serialized companion piece to the auteur’s prior efforts in the genre: poised, pulsating with dread, and permeated with cautious optimism that, perhaps, scrupulous rationality might help us triumph over modern-day irrationality.

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.

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.

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.

Patience is recommended, because it takes a while for Mindhunter to embed its hooks and acclimate Groff, who at times seems to be almost painfully “finding” his character. ... Based on what we have, Mindhunter is plodding at times but promising in the main.

This isn’t your typical good vs. evil, cops vs. robbers procedural. If anything, it’s trying to eliminate those conceptions. Sometimes it’s funny. Often it’s chilling. But however you take it, at least Mindhunter is working a fresh angle.

“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.

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.

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.

Mindhunter is compelling purely as a well-executed, smart, and suspenseful work of crime drama, but it is necessary viewing because it so deftly provokes a conversation about that very same crisis.

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.

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.

At its best, the genre tries to understand the roots of crime by investigating some of humanity’s most vexing paradoxes. Mindhunter, curious and thoughtful, is an example of the latter.

An unusually cerebral and chillingly absorbing drama. [16-29 Oct 2017, p.15]

[The series] is beautifully adapted by Joe Penhall with the kind of attention to character detail we see reflected in the hyperrealistic ’70s look of the series.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Occasionally flat, sporadically gruesome, Mindhunter is also potentially absorbing.

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.