Hamburg’s St. Pauli district in the 1970s is a neighbourhood of night-time entertainment and its nocturnal figures: habitual drinkers and prostitutes, gambling addicts and other lonely souls. Fritz Honka, a short man with thick horn-rimmed glasses and an unfortunate face, is one of them. An unskilled labourer, he picks up lonely older women, down-at-heel drinkers, in a local boozer called ‘Zum Goldenen Handschuh’ (The Golden Glove). Nobody realises that he batters and strangles these women in his attic apartment, then dismembers them and disposes of their remains behind the attic wall. Distributing scented air-fresheners throughout the building to disguise the stench of decay, he blames the neighbouring Greek family for the penetrating smells.
Based on the true case of serial killer Fritz Honka and on Heinz Strunk’s 2016 crime novel, Fatih Akin has created a portrait of a socially depraved, violent criminal, driven by misogyny, sexual greed and sentimentality. Akin’s film is a social study of the flip side of the then recent economic miracle; it is about individuals thrown off-kilter by the war and post-war turmoil in a dark Germany wholly lacking in confidence.