This is prime-era Spader. He’s perfected that soft-spoken menace, the lizard-cool gaze, but here he’s playing both sides: an idealist and his harder, more suspect twin. The double performance is a big reason to show up, but you stay for the slow smoky burn of pulp detective work.
The ‘Jack The Ripper Copycat’ premise promises saucy thrills with a Giallo edge, but what you get is a serial killer procedural wrapped in saxy liminal neon noir.
In fact, stylistically, it lands somewhere between an 80s crime drama and the big studio cat-and-mouse thrillers that would take over the next decade. You can feel the genre shifting – the investigative angle, the psych evaluations, the lone man piecing things together while being watched himself. There’s no courtroom, no prestige sheen, no erotic charge. Just the groundwork: obsession, identity, misdirection.
That makes it a worthwhile footnote in the lead-up to the studio psychological thriller boom that would dominate the early ’90s.
Not a cult film. Not a rediscovered gem. Just a well-executed genre piece with a strong centre and a clear place on the timeline. -Pop