That Grip

Jonas Dassler plays Fritz Honka hunched and desperate, watching women in bars with the intensity of someone who will never be wanted. Fatih Akin’s film doesn’t romanticize him or apologize for depicting him—it just watches, patient and exact. Honka was a real killer in Hamburg, the 1970s, murdering prostitutes and keeping what was left in his apartment while neighbors complained about the smell. The film doesn’t turn that into spectacle. It makes it banal, which is worse.

Heinz Strunk’s novel came first. It’s not really about crime or morality—it’s a portrait of drowning, of beer and cheap bars and the Hamburg underworld, all the small desperations that don’t matter to anyone but the person feeling them. The novel was nominated for the Leipzig Prize, which tells you something about how German literature sits with its dark histories. Not as warning or judgment, but as fact.

The strange thing is how ordinary Akin makes it all feel. The bars are real, the music is the kind of schlager nobody under fifty wants to hear, the dialogue mundane. The killer isn’t a villain—he’s just a man, unremarkable until he isn’t. The film doesn’t let you feel superior to him or distance yourself. You’re there in those rooms hearing what he hears, understanding nothing.

I’m drawn to films that don’t compromise, that trust you to sit with something ugly without being told what to think. This one is blackly comic in places, bleak in others. There’s a scene in a bar I can’t shake—the way people respond to violence when it hasn’t happened yet. Everyone is complicit in some small way, and the film knows it.

You don’t leave thinking about the performances or the craft, though both are exact. You leave thinking about the gap between the life you live and the life you want, and how sometimes that gap has a smell. That’s what stays with you.