Critic Reviews

Mindhunter is telling a long story, one that is engaging on multiple levels, understanding that you need strong characters and a compelling episodic structure to make a show great. It covers a lot of ground in 10 episodes.

The long-awaited second season of David Fincher’s “Mindhunter” affirms the program as Netflix’s strongest drama. Even more ambitious and mesmerizing than the first season.

Penhall and Fincher diligently avoided romanticizing or mythologizing [the serial killers], instead exposing the mundane grotesqueries of their pathetic, broken natures—the petty resentments, the self-deception, the delusional narcissism, the sexual and social impotence. Season 2 carries on in the same vein, but with a breathtaking urgency largely missing from the more ambling first season.

The series fascinates rather than unsettles. Yet the picture it paints of Manson, Rader and the rest is never glib. It’s a remarkable achievement and one of those rare “binge-watch” shows that lives up to the billing. You really will want to snaffle it down in one sitting.

Mindhunter explores grotesquerie, but the effect is good-humored. Here at the supernova-birth of modern evil, David Fincher has chilled out.

“Mindhunter” is deeper, richer, and more affecting this go round, even as it steers away from studying proven killers.

Groff is immediately persuasive as a person whose raw talent is as much a hindrance as an advantage, and Fincher's surgically precise touch is evident in even tiny details like the police bullhorn that distorts a cop's voice to just the right unnerving degree. ... It's never less than engrossing. Fincher's proven time and again that he can make even the most mundane activities and actions riveting.

The result is a worthy serialized companion piece to the auteur’s prior efforts in the genre: poised, pulsating with dread, and permeated with cautious optimism that, perhaps, scrupulous rationality might help us triumph over modern-day irrationality.

Atmospheric and chilling as ever – generally without being gory beyond clinical crime scene still photos – “Mindhunter” remains one of the current era’s best series. ... Season two widens its lens to give each of the three lead characters more equal footing.

Mindhunter is addictive and resonant for its mining of two evocative forms of social contrast. The terrific cast informs Fincher and creator Joe Penhall's sociological schematic with a human element that's unusual for a crime procedural, and the series has a piercing sense of how macro influences micro culture.