Mindhunter Review

Fincher's series is built almost entirely out of conversation, and it is the rare show that treats a man sitting across a table as an action sequence. The Ed Kemper scenes work because Cameron Britton plays him as courteous, patient and entirely reasonable, which is far more frightening than any performance of menace would be. Erik Messerschmidt lights the whole thing in cold institutional greens and browns and blocks it with an exactness that makes an FBI basement feel like a crime scene of its own.

Jonathan Groff is asked to play a man being slowly hollowed out by his own curiosity and does it in small increments, while Holt McCallany gives Bill Tench a weariness that keeps the show grounded whenever Ford drifts toward showboating. What holds it a step below the top is structural. The plot is a research project, so seasons build toward institutional approval rather than resolution, and the Atlanta case in the second year is left hanging by a cancellation nobody planned around. Nineteen episodes of the most controlled direction on television, stopped mid sentence.