Simon Killer (2012) - 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.

90

Chris Klimek Village Voice

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

90

Jeannette Catsoulis The New York Times

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.

75

William Goss The Playlist

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.

75

Slant Magazine

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.

75

Noel Murray The A.V. Club

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.

60

Peter Debruge Variety

Considering how graphic Campos is willing to be, "restrained" may not the right word for his approach, and yet Simon Killer withholds so much that some amount of frustration is sure to follow.

40

Keith Uhlich Time Out

Even at its most affecting, Simon Killer rarely seems like more than a cinema-du-Gaspar-Noé simulacrum. The languorous long-takes, dissociative sound design and strobe-light scene transitions meant to mirror this emotional con artist’s skewed view of the world are anxiety-of-influence hand-me-downs through and through—viscera without vision.

20

Joe Neumaier New York Daily News

Sort of “An American Psycho’s European Vacation,” this indie dramatic thriller mixes sex and violence and still winds up dull.

10

Todd McCarthy The Hollywood Reporter

This lushly and pretentiously made drama about a young American whose worst instincts are unleashed during a stay in Paris endeavors to entice with details of the seedy underworld of La Pigalle but is a turn-off in almost every respect.