With Mind­hunter, David Fincher’s killer com­pletes their journey

In his quar­ter-cen­tu­ry work­ing in film and tele­vi­sion, specif­i­cal­ly through five movies and two series, David Finch­er has shown a deep-root­ed fas­ci­na­tion with the remorse­less killer. One was the star of his inaus­pi­cious direc­to­r­i­al debut, while many oth­ers fea­ture in his lat­est small-screen thriller.

Cre­at­ed by play­wright Joe Pen­hall but with Fincher’s fin­ger­prints all over it (he report­ed­ly ran the writ­ers’ room, while the four book­end­ing episodes he direct­ed set the tone and visu­al lan­guage for the first sea­son), Mind­hunter is based on the true account of the FBI unit which ush­ered in crim­i­nal pro­fil­ing in the late 1970s, inter­view­ing incar­cer­at­ed killers so that law­mak­ers might fath­om their behav­iour and learn how to catch more.

Mindhunter’s plot may echo The Silence of the Lambs, but in exe­cu­tion the show looks like the cul­mi­na­tion of Fincher’s career-long obses­sion. Alien 3’s killer was lit­er­al­ly an alien pres­ence that stalked its vic­tims from the shad­ows; Seven’s was an enig­ma only revealed to the audi­ence in the third act; Zodi­ac offered sev­er­al sus­pects with­out ever pin­ning down a sin­gle cul­prit; The Girl with the Drag­on Tat­too brought us face to face with an every­day mur­der­er after a fea­ture-length hunt; while Gone Girl made a pro­tag­o­nist of a mur­der­ous sociopath, not unlike House of Cards, on which Finch­er is exec­u­tive pro­duc­er and occa­sion­al direc­tor. If some­one were to chrono­log­i­cal­ly binge on Fincher’s fil­mog­ra­phy, they would wit­ness the slow de-mythol­o­gi­sa­tion of the movie murderer.

As Finch­er has dug deep­er and deep­er over time, his antag­o­nists have trans­formed from spec­tral to flesh-and-blood. In Sev­en, he fix­ates on the car­nage a killer has left in their wake; in Gone Girl, he explores how the killer came to be. Mind­hunter asks a sim­i­lar ques­tion, but goes even fur­ther, allow­ing the killer to pro­vide the answers in their own words.

The show’s set-pieces are not action-based but rather frank con­ver­sa­tions between Jonathan Groff’s agent Hold­en Ford, a qui­et­ly inscrutable pres­ence who acts as the audience’s proxy, his sea­soned part­ner Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), and any num­ber of shack­led per­sons of inter­est, from the gar­ru­lous ​‘Co-ed Killer’ Edmund Kem­per (Cameron Brit­ton), to ​‘Shoe Fetish Slay­er’ Jer­ry Bru­dos (Hap­py Ander­son) and snarling mass mur­der­er Richard Speck (Jack Erdie). Cru­cial­ly, we only ever see these killers in chains, neutered and locked deep with­in the con­fines of deten­tion facil­i­ties they’ll nev­er escape, open­ly dis­cussing their crimes and expos­ing what it is that makes them tick.

Mindhunter’s killers dif­fer from Alien 3’s xenomorph, a night­mar­ish fig­ure that seem­ing­ly can pounce at any time from any­where, or Seven’s John Doe (Kevin Spacey), a reli­gious zealot effort­less­ly car­ry­ing out a bible-themed mas­ter­plan, both of them ter­ri­fy­ing in their unfa­mil­iar­i­ty and nigh-on omnipo­tence. Zodi­ac, Fincher’s study in obses­sion which Mind­hunter recalls in its foren­sic pro­ce­dur­al nature, was the first film in which Finch­er attempt­ed to get to the psy­cho­log­i­cal root of a killer.

Zodi­ac presents us with com­plex sus­pects like Arthur Leigh Allen (John Car­roll Lynch), open­ing up the nature ver­sus nur­ture debate that dom­i­nates Mindhunter’s every scene, but with the Zodi­ac uncaught at that film’s close we’re still in the dark, left to pon­der whether the moti­va­tion of the killer is sim­ply some inher­ent evil. Mind­hunter is all about dis­pelling that notion.

Once unseen or draped in shad­ow, Fincher’s killers are now clear as day, lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly. Light has entered Fincher’s mur­der­ous oeu­vre. Where Alien 3 and Sev­en were slash­ers lensed in murky chiaroscuro and oppres­sive­ly moody, Fincher’s recent efforts have been spiked with sur­pris­ing humour – Gone Girl could almost be cat­e­gorised as a black com­e­dy about mar­i­tal dis­cord – and shot with the pre­cise, sepia-tint­ed look that has become the director’s sig­na­ture style.

The lethal sub­jects of Fincher’s movies are no longer obscured. They speak direct­ly to us. Fincher’s killers, once so mys­te­ri­ous, now unrav­el them­selves, break­ing the fourth wall in House of Cards or nar­rat­ing the dra­ma they’ve cre­at­ed in Gone Girl. They are Ed Kem­per or Jer­ry Bru­dos mat­ter-of-fact­ly self-analysing before an audi­ence over morn­ing cof­fee and cigarettes.

Where once Fincher’s killers were unknow­able, now they are illu­mi­nat­ed. Where Fincher’s tales of preda­tors and prey were sen­so­r­i­al, grue­some hor­rors designed to scare and dis­gust, now they have become ana­lyt­i­cal, detail-obsessed and fas­tid­i­ous­ly designed like Zodi­ac, and keen to crack the killer’s psy­che as in Gone Girl or Mind­hunter. As the direc­tor has shift­ed away from straight hor­ror into dra­ma, he has trans­formed from a sto­ry­teller play­ing on our fears to one who seeks to under­stand what makes us afraid and help us fear no more.

Dis­armed and on dis­play, Fincher’s mon­sters are now revealed to be human beings, dis­turbed but as vul­ner­a­ble and banal as we are. Whether that’s reas­sur­ing or even more unset­tling than before is up to the indi­vid­ual view­er to decide.