As true crime has evolved into one of streaming’s defining narrative forms, a quieter strain of arthouse cinema has approached the subject from an altogether different direction as portraits of loneliness, social decay, and the unsettling banality of violence. The crime itself frequently occupies surprisingly little screen time.

ATIKH RASHID

The popularity of true crime is often explained through a deceptively simple contradiction: we seek proximity to what we fear. Psychologists have variously attributed the genre’s appeal to morbid curiosity, our evolved vigilance toward danger, and an impulse to rehearse threats from the safety of spectatorship. Cognitive film scholars similarly argue that narrative cinema functions as a laboratory for emotional simulation, allowing audiences to test moral intuitions and empathic responses without material risk. True crime, as per them, satisfies an ancient desire to understand violence by transforming it into narrative. The murderer is apprehended, the motives are catalogued, and disorder eventually yields to explanation.

Yet contemporary true crime culture—particularly as shaped by streaming platforms—has gradually shifted from understanding violence to consuming it. The documentary series, with its episodic revelations, archival footage, police interviews, and dramatic cliffhangers, has become an endlessly renewable machine of suspense. Murder is reorganized into content. Victims become mysteries, perpetrators become puzzles, and investigation itself becomes spectacle. Even when ethically motivated, the genre often reproduces the procedural logic of law enforcement, asking not what violence feels like or what social worlds produce it, but merely who committed it and how they were caught.

There exists, however, another lineage of cinema that approaches true crime from almost the opposite direction. One that distrusts revelation, resists procedural satisfaction, and refuses the reassuring architecture of justice: the arthouse true crime. These are the films which have at their central plot a true crime – or even a serial killer – and are made by independent filmmakers and are mainly circulated through festival circuit, unlike the true crime documentary genre which gathered a startling momentum through digital screening platforms. It is a cinema scattered across countries and decades rather than united by movement or manifesto—a constellation of films that might be called arthouse true crime.

I am talking here about films such as Angst (1983), Gerald Kargl’s suffocating immersion into the fractured consciousness of a serial killer; Sion Sono’s Cold Fish (2010), which transforms a notorious Japanese murder case into a corrosive study of patriarchal domination and capitalist excess; Vincent Le Port’s Bruno Reidal: Confession of a Murderer (2021), an austere adaptation of a real murderer’s written confession that privileges introspection over explanation; and Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019), an unflinching portrait of postwar social decay seen through the crimes of Fritz Honka. A notable addition to this constellation of movies is Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle (2024), which situates the horrors of the Danish serial baby killer Dagmar Overbye case within the brutal realities of poverty, motherhood, and postwar Europe.

These films are interested less in crime than in the ordinary conditions surrounding it: poverty, alienation, masculinity, social neglect, loneliness, labor, hunger, repression. Violence arrives not as an exceptional rupture but as something disturbingly embedded within everyday life.

Watching these films often means abandoning the expectations cultivated by Netflix. There are no detectives, retired or serving, guiding us through evidence, no experts reconstructing timelines for the screen, no comforting narration promising that every question will eventually be answered. Instead, we inhabit spaces rather than stories. We remain with people long after conventional narratives would have moved on. The crime itself frequently occupies surprisingly little screen time.

What distinguishes arthouse true crime is not simply aesthetic sophistication but a radically different ethics of looking.

Social landscape of violence

One place to begin is with The Girl with the Needle (2024), the recent period drama by Magnus von Horn that hauntingly reimagines of the crimes of Dagmar Overbye, the Danish woman convicted of murdering infants in the uneasy years following the First World War.  Von Horn has little interest in reconstructing the case or in tracing the neat causal arc from crime to punishment that has become the default grammar of the contemporary documentary series. Instead, he drifts outward, away from the killer and toward the world that made her legible: a Copenhagen of soot-blackened factories, amputee veterans, unwanted pregnancies, and women for whom survival itself had become a daily negotiation.

The film’s emotional centre is not Overbye but Karoline, a young seamstress navigating a society that has already abandoned her long before she encounters the woman who promises refuge. The murders emerge gradually, almost imperceptibly, from this landscape of deprivation, as though they were another symptom of a social order that had already normalized quieter forms of violence.

That displacement—from the event to its atmosphere—is where the film locates its cinematic power. A conventional true-crime series would almost certainly organise the Overbye case around evidence, testimony, chronology: archival photographs, police files, expert commentary, the steady accumulation of facts leading toward judicial closure. Von Horn does something far more elusive. He empties the narrative of investigation almost entirely, replacing it with duration. The camera lingers on corridors and stairwells, on factory floors humming with mechanical repetition, on faces suspended in moments of waiting that seem to stretch beyond narrative time. Information is withheld not to manufacture suspense but to dissolve it. One is never encouraged to solve the crime so much as to inhabit the historical conditions from which it became thinkable.

Its monochrome imagery only deepens this sensation. Bodies emerge from darkness only to disappear back into it, while the city itself becomes less a setting than a material condition pressing against its inhabitants. Poverty acquires a tactile weight; interiors seem permanently deprived of air; faces bear the sediment of labour and hunger before they express emotion. Violence, when it arrives, scarcely disrupts the rhythm of these spaces because the world itself has already been organised around quieter forms of attrition.

What makes The Girl with the Needle stand away from the contemporary true crime is not that it humanises Dagmar Overbye but that she isn’t the privileged object of the gaze. She remains opaque, unsettling, resistant to diagnosis. Instead, the film asks us to attend to everything that ordinarily disappears in crime narratives: the economic structures that render certain lives disposable, the fragile solidarities among women, the institutional indifference that transforms desperation into opportunity. The crimes are never explained away, nor are they elevated into singular acts of monstrous evil. They remain embedded within the ordinary textures of social life, where history itself begins to resemble the unseen accomplice.

Akin’s grotesque examination

If The Girl with the Needle traces violence back to the invisible architectures of social abandonment, then Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019) descends into a world where abandonment has already become a way of life. When this film premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, it sharply divided critics. Many dismissed it as an exercise in calculated repulsion, accusing Akin of wallowing in degradation and reducing the suffering of Honka’s victims to grotesque spectacle.

Based on the crimes of the West German serial killer Fritz Honka, who murdered at least four women in Hamburg during the early 1970s, the film unfolds almost entirely within a handful of oppressive interiors: the titular dive bar, cramped apartments stained by nicotine and neglect, and the claustrophobic attic where Honka’s victims disappear into the architecture itself. At first glance, Akin’s film seems to embrace the lurid iconography that arthouse cinema has traditionally held at arm’s length. There are decomposing bodies, bursts of startling brutality, prosthetic grotesquerie, and an almost overwhelming sensory assault. It is perhaps unsurprising that many critics dismissed the film as little more than exploitation masquerading as prestige.

The murders, shocking as they are, occupy surprisingly little narrative importance. What lingers instead are the rituals surrounding them: endless rounds of cheap schnapps, stale cigarette smoke hanging in the air, broken conversations between people too intoxicated to finish their sentences, and the melancholy choreography of regulars who return to the Golden Glove every evening because there is nowhere else left to go. Honka himself is almost incidental to this social landscape. He is neither criminal mastermind nor charismatic psychopath—the two dominant archetypes of contemporary true crime. He is physically deformed, emotionally stunted, sexually frustrated, and painfully ordinary. His monstrosity lies less in exceptional intelligence than in his utter banality. Akin refuses the perverse glamour that so often accompanies cinematic serial killers, presenting Honka instead as another discarded body among many.

In this regard, The Golden Glove is less interested in serial murder than in the slow violence of social invisibility. Its most devastating observation is that Honka’s victims are able to disappear because they had already, in many respects, disappeared from public life. Their absence scarcely registers beyond the confines of the neighbourhood because the film insists that neglect precedes murder. By the time violence erupts, society has already withdrawn its gaze.

Its aesthetic, too, is one of relentless materiality. Every surface appears damp with sweat, grease, alcohol, and decay. Wallpaper peels from nicotine-stained walls; food rots on kitchen counters; fluorescent lighting renders flesh sickly rather than expressive. One comes away remembering textures before events, smells before plot. In many ways, Akin replaces the evidentiary logic of true crime with what might be called an archaeology of environment.

The film doesn’t transform Honka into an unknowable monster whose evil reassures us of our own normality. Nor are his victims sanctified into abstract symbols of innocence. Instead, Akin insists on something far more unsettling: that everyone in this world has already been shaped, diminished, and forgotten by the same social conditions, even if only one of them becomes a murderer.

Not a procedural

If conventional true crime is organised around information, arthouse true crime is organised around duration. Its attention drifts toward the moments that procedural narratives routinely discard: a meal prepared in silence, an empty factory floor, a solitary drink, the slow rhythms of work and waiting. Violence is no longer an event to be reconstructed but a condition that gradually settles over everyday life.

Victims exist before they become victims; perpetrators remain morally accountable without being reduced to monsters. Explanation never hardens into exoneration. What these films ultimately deny is the comfort of distance. Murder appears neither exceptional nor spectacular, but banal, repetitive, woven into histories of loneliness, deprivation, and neglect. Their gaze shifts from the crime itself to the social worlds that make such violence imaginable—a refusal of easy causality that may be arthouse true crime’s most quietly radical gesture.