Director Tolga Karaçelik’s “The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer,” at its core, is a straightforward and self-explanatory film. As Karaçelik’s English-language debut, this dark comedy provides everything you need to know about the plot; and it’s up to the film’s execution to make a worthwhile story out of such a chaotic premise.
Alas, such straightforwardness also meant that the film makes good on its title. For a cast of this caliber and a story this promising, it’s disappointing how the film ends up feeling shallow.
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A Struggling Writer and His (Quietly) Resentful Wife
‘The Shallow Tale’ introduces us to Keane (John Magaro), a self-absorbed writer who shares to his friends over a dinner party the plot details of the latest book he’s working on. There’s an air of obliviousness to him that we immediately see. His friends laugh at him even as he passionately tells them that the next book would be about a forbidden love story between a Homo sapiens woman and the last living Neanderthal man in 40,000 BC somewhere in the caves of Slovenia.
It doesn’t take long for audiences to realize that even Keane himself doesn’t know where he’s going with his idea, something that his wife Suzie (Britt Lower) quietly resents, and which resentment would play an integral role throughout the entire movie. On their way home from the dinner party, they almost get into a broadside collision when Suzie mistakenly tells Keane that the light is green.
During the first few minutes of the film, we already see cracks in their marriage that Suzie wants Keane to notice, but something the latter seems incapable of doing — from Keane’s four-plus years of writer’s block to her being the breadwinner for the two of them. All these come to a head one evening when Suzie calmly informs Keane that she wants a divorce.
“Like Don Quixote and Sancho”
Earlier that day at a diner, Keane meets an unusual man (Steve Buscemi) by chance. A fan of the writer’s previous book, the man — who goes by the name of Kollmick — discloses his secret as a self-retired serial killer. He then proposes a strange idea: that Keane’s next book should focus on the lives of serial killers, with Kollmick serving as his mentor, teaching him the techniques of stalking and kidnapping.
As Keane gets drunk at a bar that night after Suzie announces her intentions of getting a divorce, he considers Kollmick’s offer. Suddenly, the man appears, reiterates the proposal, and promises a best-seller as the two of them venture “like Don Quixote and Sancho.” Keane, wanting to be a gracious host, invites the man to his house for whiskey, where Suzie discovers them. To cover up the situation, Keane improvises that Kollmick is an unorthodox marriage counselor, a story that the retired serial killer reluctantly goes along with.
A Wasted Potential Almost Saved by the Performances
Magaro does his best to make Keane a memorable character, but it’s less of the actor’s performance and more of Karaçelik’s screenplay that is the culprit here. The film adds its main character into a growing list of ‘self-absorbed struggling writer’ movie tropes, but doesn’t provide more dimension to its characterization that helps leave a distinct mark. Think of someone like Eddie Morra who packs a boatload of charisma, or Calvin Weir-Fields whose timid introversion can be endearing.
Keane, on the other hand, is simply egocentric: a legend in his own mind who doesn’t give two craps about what his wife thinks and has compromised for their marriage.
Buscemi and Lower hold their own, too, with the former’s Kollmick providing natural comic relief just by keeping a straight face even when his frustration with Keane grows by the minute. It’s fun to see Buscemi portraying Kollmick as a clueless therapist by day and Keane’s trainer at night. I feel like ‘The Shallow Tale’ is at its best when the filmmakers key in on this duality; especially when Lower’s Suzie remarks that their marriage counselor, despite the unusual methodologies, looks like “he knows what he’s doing.’
Without warning, the film then sharply cuts to Kollmick and Keane debating whether to use chloroform while staking out the latter’s agent to kidnap him. All this, as Kollmick defends his routine of listening to a very specific song on loop (Baccara’s “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie”) before doing his hits because it helps him focus and gets him in the mood.
‘The Shallow Tale’ Underscores a Lack of Nuance in Direction
All those offbeat scenes and the nuances the characters’ situations present would’ve made for a very good dark comedy. And it should. And yet, ‘The Shallow Tale’ is indicative of Karaçelik’s lack of nuance in direction.
There are a few scenes where Kollmick embodies narrative exposition to speed up the audience’s background in serial killing, autopsies, and getting away from murder scot-free. Easter eggs and namedrops such as Erle Stanley Gardner, Charles Hirsch, and Milton Helpern (“think of him as the American equivalent of Sherlock Holmes”) abound here, which do little to nothing in the service of the story.
There’s also the problem with the over-reliance on the storylines to generate laughs, instead of simply fleshing out the characters and their quirks. What history does Kollmick have? Why has Keane not matured emotionally in the relationship? What do Suzie’s behaviors tell about her personality and her character moving forward? These are questions that the film could have explored throughout its 100-minute runtime. Instead, we’re treated to botched attempts at abduction, backup plans when the original plans went awry, and an ending so abrupt that even its surprising luridness couldn’t offset the film’s frustrating midpoint.
“The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer” presents a unique perspective on well-known movie tropes with its innovative approach. It’s just too bad that the overall energy of the performances doesn’t quite line up with that of the screenplay, resulting in a disjointed movie experience that’s all lethargic and half-baked.
