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‘The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer’ Review: A Lurid Comedy That Skips Past Its Best Ideas

With 'The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer,' John Magaro and Steve Buscemi shine in an otherwise dull affair.

That one element gives way to an even more amusing conceit, involving crossed-wires and mistaken identities, but its wires continue to cross, until the movie mutates beyond recognition, refusing to stick to any one idea for longer than a couple of scenes. The film’s music, by Nathan Klein, is mischievous and rooted in character specifics — its primal, visceral sounds tie into Keane’s in-progress Neanderthal romance novel, down to the writer mentioning a rudimentary flute — but the score never evolves to accommodate the movie’s shifting premise or subject matter. Buscemi’s commitment to a comically methodical killer is similarly undone by how swiftly each situation goes awry, forcing Keane and Kollmick to approach each scene with an identically clumsy vibe (the comedy of contrast never seems to arise, despite being baked into the key dynamic).

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