During the 1960s, in Boston, women were on edge as a serial strangler was on the loose targeting their victims, seemingly at random.  Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley) is a reporter for the Record-American Newspaper, unfortunately, stuck at the lifestyle desk.  Despite the editor, Jack Maclaine’s (Chris Cooper) hesitations, he allows Loretta to pursue a piece seeking to connect the murders, but only with the assistance of Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), one of the paper’s established investigative reporters.  The story explodes, igniting a rage across the city of Boston as it is revealed how sloppily the police have been handling the case, and tips off other police departments from across the Northeast region who were investigating similar crimes of their own. 

Written and directed by Matt Ruskin, Boston Strangler dropped on Hulu directly from Twentieth Century Studios.  The 112-minute true-crime drama unfolds like an elaborate mystery box thriller, handsomely shot by Ben Kutchins with a color palette that helps to establish the period and scored by Paul Leonard-Morgan whose tinkering notes add to the intrigue of the mystery.  Ruskin’s script has a lot of ground to cover, both setting up the facts and the details of the case, while also running a concurrent story about Loretta’s fight against sexism in the workplace in the 1960s.  It is a bit of a balancing act, and while it serves as a decent telling of both aspects of the story, there needs to be more exploration both into the case and the system for it to really hit home and break out of the period procedural mold. Ultimately, the film feels too short, but thankfully what does make it to the screen is quite engaging. 

Knightley excels in the grounded drama and brings a fierce passion to the screen.  While her victories do not come easy, the script, unfortunately, remains very surface level in its examination of the sexism which she is facing and it relies on repetitive exchanges and tropes of the time to do the heavy lifting. While audiences get to revel along with Loretta in her success, we do feel deprived of some greater impact.  Her character feels stuck on a track, moving through the film and while there is a distinguishable amount of growth when you take a step back, it would have been nice to see more here and we are similarly deprived of the thrill of chasing down a lead.  As presented, it plays out more like Loretta moving along until she gets stuck and is then bailed out by Jean who has a few more connections to utilize, though it should be noted that Jean’s assistance to Loretta is never so wild that it seems out of place.   

The problem with this dynamic is that there are not enough true teamwork sequences and Jean, even at her friendliest, still has a standoffish air about her.  Frankly, though, Coon is underutilized in the film, and while we do get brief glimpses into her home and family life, it is not enough to draw meaningful conclusions between her and Loretta, especially as Loretta’s marriage begins to unwind in an equally undercooked plot line. Looking at any of the major journalism thrillers – All the President’s Men (1976), Spotlight (2015), and most recently She Said (2022) – the teamwork is what helps soothe the discomfort of the stories the writing teams are breaking. There are brief flashes of this camaraderie between the two journalists as Loretta picks up some tips vicariously through Jean, and the two are seen unwinding at the bar a few times throughout the duration but we are largely denied any of the ancillary conversations they may be having that would help deepen and broaden their characters.     

Boston Strangler is aiming for a slightly grittier tone, more akin to Zodiac (2007), but Ruskin stops just short of really being able to deliver the payoffs.  For a story that revolves around such a gruesome string of attacks, he makes the respectful decision not to glorify any of the murders by keeping all of the violence against the women off-screen, but he also does not give the characters enough drama to – as bad as it sounds – make up for it, so that the film feels almost afraid of tacking its subject matter instead of being in control of the narrative. He plays it right down the center for the entire run time so that while we understand on an intellectual level that the Stranger is a threat as his body count keeps rising higher and higher, we never feel the danger on the same emotional level. 

The runaway plot becomes more evident as the film wanes on into the third act which begins to levy more of the blame on this serial threat to the city and the lack of response from the Boston Police. Conley (Alessandro Nivola) is our main window into this aspect of the story, a detective who starts out invigorated to apprehend the murderer and enraged at the paper’s assertation that the police are not doing enough, but eventually getting worn down to eventual acceptance that whatever suspects they have captured to this point will need to be enough and mark the case as closed. It is an area ripe for exploration as Conley navigates a similarly demanding and persistent job like Loretta and Jean, but his development is delivered without much nuance so that there is no emotional gradient from scene to scene. His rapport with Loretta grows which is nice to see as they form a symbiotic relationship, but the role makes large leaps which cripples Nivola’s ability to build a more fleshed-out character. 

This all stems from a pacing issue on the page. The events of the film span some ten years, but watching it, you could never tell without some backing knowledge of the case. As presented, it feels like perhaps a few months to maybe a year, but to have a decade’s worth of story to tell, there is no excuse to truncate the character’s own development as well as their relationship growth. Especially when the story allows for such deep exploration of how to balance doing the right thing for the community and doing the right thing for your family. With three lead characters taking largely different approaches, it is a shame we do now delve into the drama that lingers right underneath the surface.  

As mentioned, Boston Strangler has a gritty tone, all culminating in a truly bleak ending as is par for the course on many of these films where, despite efforts made, the bad guys still seem to get away with it. It ends with a narration akin to a bastardization of Lt. Gordon’s “He’s the Hero” speech at the tail end of The Dark Knight (2008), except it likens the Strangler to an easy out for creeps who either need to dispatch of a girl they were courting, or they just want to enact a heinous crime and see the “lore” of the Strangler case as a convenient scapegoat. Ruskin has the benefit of the multiple suspects theory in his favor as the victim’s locations and demographics began to vary more and more as the string of murders continued on, but he rushes to close the film and wraps it up a little too cleanly with some closing title cards. It feels twee, a little like “happily ever after,” creating a stark counter-tone given the ambiguity which still surrounds the case to this day. Overall, though, Ruskin still delivers an enjoyable procedural. He plays it safe which prevents it from really breaking out and leaving a lasting impression, but Knightley’s engaged performance and the twisted turns the case does take keep eyes pretty well locked on the television as there are no real dips in tension that allow us time to give into the temptation of pulling up a second screen.