GREEN RIVER KILLER

Gary Ridgway, one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history, was arrested in 2001 for the murders of 48 women between 1981 and 2001. In exchange for his life, Ridgway confessed to all the murders attributed to him and gave the prosecutor a detailed description of his killing spree. His method was simple: he would pick up women, always prostitutes, take them to his home or a secluded place, kill them, and leave their bodies in the Green River near Seattle, Washington. We are living through a transformative period for horror, witnessing a mutation both in the visual aspect (see "Cloverfield" and "Rec") and in communication; television with its formats and its peculiar way of telling stories and devouring news has deeply influenced cinema and directors, who appropriate this reality TV vision, sometimes invasively, in many films. This "Green River Killer" suffers from this extreme TV style; from the first minutes, the photography and voice-over transport us into the world of so-called docu-fiction beloved by TV, where in shows and talk shows through the use of semi-professional actors, the most heinous news events are reconstructed. Disturbing images of dismembered bodies on operating tables immerse us in the disturbed world of Gary Ridgway, a rather anonymous serial killer stripped of any element of fascination, unlike Hannibal Lecter; instead, the image the film conveys is almost unsettling, such is the banality of the character. Images of the real killer making somewhat confused statements from prison, where he is serving 48 life sentences, remind us that we are watching a reconstruction based on excerpts from Ridgway's true confession. The FBI's difficulty in catching this killer, who murdered 48 times, is explained by his not fitting the classic serial killer profile established by profilers of the time. We are at the beginning of the '80s; the fact that he was married with a child quickly removed him from the list of suspects, and it took years and some DNA traces to arrest an now old and resigned Gary. Director Ulli Lommel, specialized in TV productions, of whom we only remember the interesting "Mirror – Who Lives in That Mirror?" (originally "Boogeyman", not to be confused with the recent "Boogeyman – The Boogeyman"), uses all the canons of TV storytelling, including the bad actors who should give a sense of reality to the story, then deviates from the path by inserting strong and explicit language and disturbing images that pop up here and there to distract us from the drowsy dialogues and a way of telling without personality that makes us think this product was originally conceived for some American cable TV. The story drags on for nearly two hours without leaving any trace of itself; the murders follow in a schematic and repetitive manner, like the compulsive act of taking the murdered prostitutes to the banks of the Green River to purify their bodies with the water of that river that Ridgway had loved so much as a child. Then, after the capture, during interrogations, the appearance of a phantom friend named Boris, guilty according to Ridgway of having initiated him into murder and who at some point decides to kill him, indicating him as the sole culprit of his murderous impulse. It is clear from the first lines that Boris is nothing more than a personality invented by Ridgway to justify his acts, and that the act of killing him coincided with the choice to end the series of murders with which he could no longer live. If on one hand "Green River Killer" appears as a decent TV product, on the other hand, the highly splatter inserts and explicit sexuality make it a product foreign to any classification, anonymous, and that leaves behind nothing but a sensation of disorientation and irritation. The suspicion is that this TV movie is an old work of Lommel rescued for a hasty DVD edition, so as to fill any empty spaces on the walls of our local video stores, therefore to the wise...