Few directors know how to harness the power of darkness better than David Fincher, particularly the kind that can enshroud the human mind. For the best part of 25 years, the American auteur has delved into the heads of killers to become one of cinema's grandmasters of the psychological thriller.
Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, are just a handful of the cushion-biting movies he's helmed, not to mention House of Cards which he executive produced for Netflix in 2013.
Now he's back, with a taut and menacing new series called Mindhunter, about a duo of hard-boiled FBI sleuths with permafrowns and tired eyes, tasked with doing exactly what the title implies: getting inside the minds of imprisoned serial killers and psychopaths to solve unsolved cases.
"You want truffles?" asks protagonist Holden Ford, a special agent in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, in the series' just-released teaser. "You gotta get in the dirt with the pigs."
"How do we get ahead of crazy, if we don't know how crazy thinks?" later opines his partner Bill Tench.
Set in 1979, the series stars Jonathan Groff (Looking, Boss, Glee) as Ford, and Holt McCallany (Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, Sully, Blackhat) as Tench, his fellow agent as the pair battle, not only against the dark forces of the psyches they seek to understand, but against those in the offices upstairs that want to shut them down.
As one up-tight agency superior opines: "It is not our job to commiserate with these people, it is our job to electrocute them."
They've presumably got plenty of their own demons to tussle with too, as they tumble deeper into the minds of murderers.
Based on the book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, a 1996 nonfiction book that follows the agents of the FBI's Investigative Support Unit, it's produced and part-directed by Fincher, sure. But a murder of other thriller aficionados will step behind the lens as well, including Asif Kapadia (director of Amy and Senna), Tobias Lindholm (A War, A Hijacking) and Andrew Douglas (The Amityville Horror, U Want Me 2 Kill Him?).
Now, here's the trailer:
Mindhunter debuts on Netflix on October 13, 2017.
