The Boston Strangler, review: Keira Knightley struggles to keep this do-over alive

The Boston Strangler is at least the third true-crime thriller so far about a notorious spate of early 1960s rapes and murders. It’s also a corrective of sorts. Richard Fleischer’s 1968 effort, which starred Tony Curtis as prime suspect Albert DeSalvo, was a lurid fictionalisation of zero journalistic value, which took DeSalvo’s confession as gospel and lionised the Boston police for extracting it.

In a brief scene here, Keira Knightley’s dogged reporter, Loretta McLaughlin, visits the set of what’s presumably The Strangler (1964), a tawdry cash-in even quicker off the mark, tutting and shaking her head. If there’s a copycat at large in this case, though, the finger of suspicion falls on writer-director Matt Ruskin, who borrows so much from the playbook of David Fincher’s Zodiac we start to lose faith in his specific vision.

At the Record-American newspaper, we get McLaughlin and hard-bitten colleague Jean Cole (a shrewd Carrie Coon) combatting a lot of Mad-Men-era sexism to pursue their story, when a fourth and fifth woman are killed with garments tied in a bow around their necks. Chris Cooper’s grumbling editor only assigns them because he thinks, with photo bylines, it’ll sell papers; he’s also wary of second-guessing the police investigation, despite how continually slow it is to put two and two together.

The She Said formula is locked in: two female reporters tenaciously seeking angles while men obfuscate and cover up for one other. Knightley is at least as focused here as either of that film’s stars. Her character’s refusal to be a sit-at-home housewife is more contentious, given the period, and she slyly tickles information out of cops that they protest they’d never have given to a man.

What’s less clear is what this exercise was for, other than setting the record straight on many points, some major, some pedantic. McLaughlin, as the film presents her, was the first to advance the serial-killer theory, but when the script opens up various cans of worms, we lose track of her convictions. It’s tough to try and strike a “victory for journalism!” note using a dozen unsolved murders.

The confession of DeSalvo (David Dastmalchian) was gained on the proviso it could never be used in court – a shocking sop from the authorities, well worth highlighting. But the film’s exposure of the underlying truth is sketchy and provisional – it feels like guesswork.

When McLaughlin follows another suspect right down into his creepy basement, it’s almost shot-for-shot Jake Gyllenhaal getting the willies in Zodiac. But there, the burnout, frustration and tangle of loose ends were an intentional bummer. This film pretends to be cleaning house chez Mr Strangler, when it’s just pushing dust around.

16+ cert, 116 min. On Disney+ from Friday