By I am a huge fan of horror movies, which aligns closely to my die hard love of ultra-high stakes. Nothing quite showcases a character like tossing them into a boiling cauldron and seeing what happens.
I recently watched I Am Not a Serial Killer (based on a novel of the same name by Dan Wells) and found myself treated to one of the more interesting character studies I’ve watched or read in a while. The film focuses on John, a teenager diagnosed as a sociopath who lives by a strict set of “rules” to curb his homicidal ideations. He is fixated on serial killers and this interest spurs him to take a keen interest when reports of a serial killer emerge right in his town.
What struck me about this film was that although they positioned John to be the killer, we find out early on he isn’t. He maintains that his interest in finding the real killer is purely scientific. After all, he spends the entirety of the movie insisting that he doesn’t feel human emotion or empathy. He says this a lot.
But as the film rolls on, none of his actions line up with his ongoing insistence that he is incapable of caring for other people. He nearly goes mad with grief and rage when his therapist becomes the killer’s next victim. When he realizes his mother is the killer’s next target? His emotional reaction is visceral.
For a guy who can’t stop telling other people (re: himself) that he is utterly without emotion, his screaming, “You cannot have him!” sure tells us a different story, or rather, it shows us a different story.
The writers used dialogue and action to show us significant parts of this character. John tells us one thing, but his actions show us something else. What’s more: the contradiction at play shows us even more about John. It shows us how tightly he clings to the emotional space he’s crafted for himself. He gets to set himself apart from others and protect himself by hiding behind the walls of his diagnosis, rather than confronting the reality that he can be effected by emotion.
None of the impact would be there if the filmmakers had chosen to simply tell us this information. Instead, they used a contradiction in dialogue and action to illustrate powerful character building, which can easily translate to the page as it did on screen.