DailyView: Day 262, Movie 367

A Kind of Murder is a 2016 psychological thriller with some noir tendencies with an interesting performance from Patrick Wilson. After that, there is not a whole lot remaining.

Patrick Wilson played architect Walter Stackhouse, who wrote stories on the side. He was fascinated by the idea of murder and he collected clipping of killing from the paper. When bookshop owner Marty Kimmel (Eddie Marsan) has his wife murdered and the police suspected him, Stackhouse was intrigued. He approached Kimmel to see what he could see.

When Stackhouse’s wife Clara (Jennifer Biel) wound up dead after several suicide attempts, the police were suspicious of Stackhouse, especially when he would lie about seemingly anything.

Detective Corby (Vincent Kartheiser) was convinced that Stackhouse was a copycat killer to Kimmel and that they both had killed their wives. He was determined to prove his theories true.

The film had a nice visual component to it. It looked great and the tone of the film was benefitted by the look of the film.

One of the issues was that the characters were not well developed, outside of Stackhouse (and that was mostly because of the performance of Wilson). There was a whole adultery angle involving Stackhouse and a singer named Ellie (Haley Bennett) which was of no consequence. We saw Clara had mental illness, but we did not go into any details on it or let it become a key component for the story. It was just a reason why Stackhouse was unhappy.

We knew almost nothing about Kimmel. He felt like a creepy little guy, but other than that surface level, we do not see anything from him. Detective Corby was nothing more than a stubborn cop who was sure he was right.

The film was not a terrible watch, but it was far from good. I did not hate watching it and there were some technical aspects of A Kind of Murder (dumb title too, by the way) that were positive. Overall though, this was not a standout.