Critic Reviews

With a dense, often impermeable style and a mentally unstable protagonist, Simon Killer is like watching the disturbed anti-hero of "Afterschool" all grown up.

If Simon Killer's tragic drift is predictable, the seedy particulars still engross. And the storytelling is first-rate.

Though the film’s ice-cold blend of the cerebral and the atavistic can be off-putting, it enables a queasy portrait of moral disengagement that lingers long after Simon has slipped from the screen.

The movie fares less well when the plot and Simon’s neuroses come to the surface, but there is some tremendous suspense in the movie’s final scene.

A noir-tinged, noose-tightening ordeal [that] confirms Antonio Campos, if not the entire Borderline Films outfit, as a filmmaker/team to be reckoned with.

The film has many elements of a thriller, but ultimately Antonio Campos's interest lies much more in profiling, yet never over-determining, his moody protagonist.

Simon Killer is a sensual experience that asks the audience to question what it sees and hears. In that way, Campos takes all-too-common feelings of loneliness and disorientation, and shows how they can shade into madness.

Writer-director Antonio Campos, making excellent use of the queasy rhythms of a percussive musical score, keeps piling up the dread as we wonder just how dangerous Simon can be to the women who keep taking pity on him.

Simon Killer...is Campos' bleakest project, which honestly makes me fearful for the future. Still, he is a provocative one to watch — willing to push the aesthetic boundaries as well as the story to extremes even when the risks don't always pay off.

Simon Killer is a beautifully made look at ugliness and brutality, the kind of oxymoronic exercise that fascinates some and repels others.