The Boston Strangler (2023)

Matt Ruskin (“Crown Heights”, “Booster”) writes and directs this latest iteration of the story of the notorious Boston Strangler murders that took place in the early 1960’s.

Anyone expecting something along the lines of the recent Dahmer series from Netflix may well end up disappointed. Whilst there is a little bit of the murders, The Boston Strangler very much focuses on the two women who wrote about the Strangler in the Record American newspaper.

Loretta McLaughlin, Keira Knightley (“Silent Night”, “Colette”), and Jean Cole, Carrie Coon (“Ghostbusters: Afterlife”, “The Post”), were the ones who first tied all of the murders together and coined the name the Boston Strangler. Prior to that, and still to some, they were known as the Phantom or the Silk Stocking Murders.

We focus very much on Loretta who, at the start, is a frustrated crime writer being forced to work on the things ‘women are expected to work on’, household appliances and gossip, this was the sixties. She badgers her boss Jack, Chris Cooper (“A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood”, “Cars 3”), until he relents.

However, when they first break the story, linking all of the murders together, Jack is visited by various people, from the police commissioner to the owner of the newspaper; none are happy, none believe the story is true, particularly as it’s written by a woman.

Jack is forced to quash any follow up, but it doesn’t take long until the Strangler strikes again and other papers begin to run a similar story. Loretta is linked-up with Cole, not an ask, and together they begin to piece the puzzle together, finding suspects and exposing the Boston Police for the mistakes they make.

The Boston Strangler is a nice piece of work, Ruskin gives us a well directed movie that puts me in mind of David Fincher’s Mindhunter. This is definitely no bad thing and makes the whole movie a very easy watch.

Knightley and Coon are great in their respective roles and whilst certain characters feel like they are straight out of the eighties book of cliched movie characters, looking at you newspaper editor and mr. detective, everything else manages enough to make the movie work as a whole.

There’s also plenty of information given about the case, many of which I wasn’t actually aware of which is always nice to see, and, at the end, we are told about both Loretta and Jeana and their lives since the case.