Latest Remake Smartly Follows Female Reporters on the Case — Original Cin

I’m still positive the Boston Strangler is Tony Curtis. Such is the power of cinema on an impressionable young mind. (I was 10 when The Boston Strangler was published).

DNA testing has since confirmed DeSalvo’s guilt as the man who raped and killed 13 women, stripping the story of some of its mysteries. When true crime junkies form a syndicate, the Boston Strangler is surely their main operation. It is a story told many times in as many ways, a factual story that varies in detail according to who is telling it and when.

On screen, The Boston Strangler was a police trial, courtroom drama, crime drama, speculative documentary and, in No way to treat a lady (1968), a comedy in which Rod Steiger takes on a barely disguised version of the strangler.

Now, in an unexpected twist, Disney+ is stepping in Boston strangler as a history of investigative journalism and last but not least as a history of fighting systematic misogyny. And while it seems contradictory to mention Disney in the same sentence as the Boston Strangler, this story-charting narrative is one of the more compelling versions, even if it rubs familiarly close she said (2022), director Maria Schrader’s latest portrayal of a journalistic struggle against institutionalized sexism (and Harvey Weinstein) in the film industry.

(Every now and then I get the urge to stage double features. Boston strangler fits well with she said).

Despite director Matt Ruskins Boston strangler Ruskin’s version, which shares a title with director Richard Fleischer’s 1968 shocker, is not a remake. Its focus diverges from the constrictor, casting lesser-known actor David Dastmalchian in the title role.

Instead, Ruskin draws the audience’s attention to two real-life journalists, Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightly) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), and the challenge they faced in covering the story that other newspapers ignored. (It is implied that the story has been overlooked as the victims are mostly single elderly women).

This is not rendered Boston strangler less gripping. If anything, it breaks out of the routine camp of guilty pleasures that taint so many of these films, particularly Netflix’s Ted Bundy film. Extremely evil, shockingly evil and vile (2019) and Dahmer Monsters: The Story of Jeffery Dahmer (2022).

If there are any similarities between Ruskin’s film and any other true crime story, it’s David Fincher’s zodiac (2007). But unlike McLaughin and Cole’s male counterparts, who endure emotional and mental exhaustion in Fincher’s film, McLaughlin and Cole battle sexism and a patriarchal system — and endure emotional and mental exhaustion.