A chemistry between a writer and killer that slays you.
The long subtitle: “The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer” basically summons up about the dark comedy “Psycho Therapy.” But don’t worry, I won’t be saying that subtitle for the rest of this review nor will I use it as an excuse to have more than 600 words written here. But I can say it’s a clever title that speaks for the movie itself.
The writer in this “Shallow Tale” is Keane (John Magaro), who is brainstorming a book idea about the last neanderthal who has a romance with a female homo sapiens in 40,000 BC Slovenia. The problem is, and even his long-suffering wife Suzie (Britt Lower from “Severance”) and agent David (Ward Horton) agree on, that the concept is not the page turner people want to read. In fact, the wife wants to divorce him.
And the serial killer in this “Shallow Tale” is a “retired serial killer” named Kollmick (Steve Buscemi), who is a big fan of Keane’s work, and wants him to write a book about him. The problem to him is that he doesn’t write books about killers nor has he ever watched movies or TV shows that cover that same subject matter. So, I guess this old guy isn’t afraid of eventually getting arrested, unless he has him change his name.
Keane comes home drunk with Kollmick accompanying him, and Suzie wonders what this guys is doing here. So her husband tells her that this guy is a marriage counselor. Kollmick knows nothing about this kind of position, and so his quote would be: “There is no such thing as progress. Only plain cold death.”
So, Kollmick would be Don Quixote and Keane would be Sancho Panza, as they agree to help each other out.
It’s amazing to me that Suzie would sleep next to her husband with a creepy ambiance and cut onions because she likes the sound of that, and I wonder what she and her husband had in common before their divorce would happen. And I’m sure she’s suspicious by Kollmick’s arrival into her life. But to me, the biggest weakness in her character is that she has to be part of a misunderstanding when she thinks that her husband is trying to murder her, when in actually he and Kollmick are planning to kidnap his agent for authenticity in the soon-to-be memoir. These segments with her engaging in this start to get exhausting, but a lot of the other elements in “Psycho Killer” really work.
The audience and I are laughing at how Kollmick takes his time to act like a marriage councilor and how Keane is not acting like a modern day J.D. Salinger or John Cheever. In fact, I think those writers would be spinning in their graves if they see what directions this young writer is taking. And his black and white movie clip of his would-be prehistoric romance is more appealing to us than it is to the supporting characters.
Both Buscemi and Magaro both deliver on the type of chemistry in such a Hitchcockian manner. Without giving too much away, I like how the writer handles his chloroform in an R-rated raunchy manner, and how it gets placed in an independent movie instead of a commercial film. Now that probably would have been forced on the actors if it went for that approach. But “Psycho Killer” uses it at the right moment.
The writer/director Tolga Karaçelik (“Butterflies”) finds the dark comedy genre as fascinating as a portion of us do, and while not all the material works, he still delivers with the right comic note. And he doesn’t oversell the movie with too many known actors. He uses a small portion that works and Buscemi and Magaro both slay you. Pun intended.
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