With all ten episodes of the first season of Mindhunter, created by playwright and screenwriter Joe Penhall (The Road) and based on John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s book Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, now available on Netflix, the first round of reviews is in. The first two episodes, directed by David Fincher, who’s also, along with Charlize Theron, Josh Donen, and Ceán Chaffin, an executive producer, were presented at the New York and London film festivals. Fincher’s also directed the final two episodes; the other directors, taking on two episodes each, are Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy), Tobias Lindholm (A Hijacking, A War), and Andrew Douglas (the 2005 version of The Amityville Horror).
“‘Peak TV,’ or at least the limited-run series, has increasingly accommodated one director who wants to do it all,” notes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, adding that “this year has seen airings of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Big Little Lies, and the indelible 18-hour run of Twin Peaks: The Return. (The recent whole-series sole-director examples of Louie and The Knick also come to mind.) It’s a drag that Fincher hasn’t chosen to direct all ten episodes himself; the first two do in fact benefit slightly from being viewed in a theater . . . , magnifying his usually typically acute and precise framing and compositions. But this is definitely TV: I was willing to take David Lynch at his word that TP:TR is an 18-hour movie . . . , but would not remotely attempt to make that case here.”
“The drama begins in 1977, the year David Berkowitz was arrested for the Son of Sam murders,” writes James Poniewozik in the New York Times. “Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), a hostage negotiator for the F.B.I., is growing troubled by a trend that he sees in the field: criminals whose actions are irrational, who therefore can’t be entreated with reason. When one negotiation goes awry, Ford’s supervisor reassures him that he did everything by the book. So Ford goes looking for another book. He takes an interest in sociology on crime as a response to dysfunction in the larger community. The post-Watergate, post-Vietnam malaise, goes the theory, yields more inexplicable crimes. As Ford puts it: ‘The world barely makes any sense, so the crime doesn’t either.’”
“The overarching tone here is very much in line with Fincher’s own Zodiac (2007), which treated the 1960s/70s-era case of the California-based Zodiac killer as a soul-crushing puzzle without a satisfying solution,” writes Keith Uhlich for the Hollywood Reporter. “Its real mystery was how long the film’s succession of determined men laboring in fluorescent-lit rooms could keep after their elusive quarry without going mad themselves. . . . Mindhunter reveals itself as a suspense series hinging on after-the-fact investigations into the heads and hearts of known murderers. Not whodunit so much as whydidyou?”
“Mindhunter is engaged with the process of law enforcement, but a procedural it isn’t,” writes Time’s Daniel D’Addario. “Instead, it examines how crime is fought to ask what it is we really want cops to do for us. This is no bleeding-heart show—it’s on the side of law enforcement and incarceration. But Mindhunter’s underlying belief, that the enemy ought to be respected and known, feels almost radical.”
“Like Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, it’s a contemplative spin on the Criminal Minds model, a cerebral procedural of visually rich pulp,” writes Erik Adams at the A.V. Club. “If it can do a better job of maintaining those Fincher flourishes than House of Cards did—there, he only directed two episodes; he bookended the first season here—Mindhunter might turn out to be the next great Netflix drama.”
“The Silence of the Lambs was an incredible recruiting tool for the FBI,” notes Fincher in a conversation with Esquire’s Adam Grant. “Investigators are criminal masterminds, in a certain way, but very sad. When you engage with this kind of inhumanity, it comes at a cost. We gift them with these superpowers, but really they are just very thoughtful hunters. They have to imagine every permutation. ‘What if the killer does this? What if the victim does this?’ They have to work this stuff out in advance. It’s not Anthony Hopkins; it’s not a gourmet chef, sommelier, and chess master. These killers are abused, confused, and evil people. This show is much more about following the trail of inhumanity.”
“Oh, I love interrogations!” exclaims Fincher in a talk with Rolling Stone’s David Fear. “I love scenes where someone is resisting the temptation to reveal things. An eight-page scene with four walls of containment fences and a stainless-steel picnic table? I'm there. Filmmakers go, ‘Ah shit, this is going to be so boring. I need to shoot some flashbacks.’ But I always go back to Jaws. It’s a lot more interesting in my mind to listen to Robert Shaw tell the story of the USS Indianapolis than to just cut to 1,100 men being eaten by a thousand sharks.”
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“There’s no time for character in movies,” Fincher tells Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. “Look at All the President’s Men—everything is character. Now, movies are about saving the world from destruction. There aren’t a lot of scenes in movies, even the ones I get to make, where anyone gets to muse about the why. . . . The cinema isn’t dead. It just does something different. The place is still filled with kids, it’s just they’re all on their phones. It’s a social event like a bonfire, and the movie is the bonfire. It’s why people gather but it’s not actually there to be looked at.”
For the Los Angeles Times, Meredith Blake talks with Groff and Holt McCallany, who plays plays Bill Tench, “a cynical veteran who asks what might be the series’ central question: ‘How do we get ahead of crazy if we don’t know how crazy thinks?’”
“Relative to Fincher’s history as a pioneer in title sequences—the juttering fragmentation of Se7en, the circuitry of the mind in Fight Club, the gleaming formal lettering of Panic Room—the opening credits in Mindhunter are a huge disappointment,” finds Scott Tobias, writing for Vulture. “We get the meticulous rendering of a recording device, interrupted by some flashes of violence, and that’s it. As straightforward as Holden’s suits.” Vashi Nedomansky disagrees; he admires “the use of subliminal edits is used to cue the viewers to the violent world of serial killers. With twenty-three shots that all last just four frames each, Fincher and his editors have created an uncomfortable atmosphere that lashes out and gives a taste of the horrors to come. I’ve captured each of these twenty-three images and let them play out for four seconds each.” The compilation runs 1’51”.
More from Oliver Lyttelton (Playlist, B+), Sonia Saraiya (Variety), and Ben Travers (IndieWire, B+).
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