Serial killers are among the few types of criminals who are often glorified for the sake of entertainment, turning horror into spectacle. However, Cooper and Robert Henderson’s The Notorious Finster takes a different approach to the serial killer genre, giving more space to the victims and not the perpetrator. The slow-burn narrative of the film keeps the audience engaged, building up to a big reveal you might see coming. But the effort the makers put into actually making you care about characters you know are going to die—now that’s something you don’t usually see in this genre of films.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the movie?
The film begins with our killer murdering a wasted teenager, Billie Miles, and then sending a recording to a detective, Brady, justifying how he ended her misery. The killer is back on the prowl after 20 years, and the cops don’t have a single piece of evidence that tells them about him. Detective Brady works with Annie Sullivan, a writer who has written extensively about the murders of the notorious Finster. Now Annie already has her own set of problems without the killer in the mix. She’s a recovering alcoholic who has moved to the countryside with her husband, Roger, and she believes that her life is going to change after moving. But even though we see Roger being a very supportive husband to her, it’s pretty evident that he has trust issues with Annie, and he isn’t sure about her being able to stay sober. As if her life wasn’t already complicated, the killer Annie once wrote about resurfaces, forcing her to confront the very demon she has made her career off of.
How does Annie deal with rural life?
Annie’s first experience going out in the new town is nothing but creepy. After being cut off by a mean, big guy in the parking lot, he gets in her car unannounced. He claims that he got in to apologize, but when Annie asks him to leave, he warns her that it’s a dangerous world in the countryside. Hearing about the incident, Roger gets all worked up, but Annie calms him down. Annie then attends an AA meeting where a regular creep, Frank, tries to hit on her, but a woman called Reyna helps Annie get out of the situation. Reyna befriends Annie, even though Annie isn’t very comfortable in the beginning. Reyna doesn’t have her addiction under control and she drinks and quits much too often. Roger thinks she’s bad news, but eventually Annie sees how Reyna is actually a kind person who has trouble handling her addiction.
Is Vincent Carlock the Notorious Finster?
While riding horses with Reyna, Annie gets to know about the history of the guy who confronted her in the parking lot. Reyna tells her all about him, his name is Vincent Carlock, and he botched a kidnapping for which he got five years in prison. Vincent came from money, and he seemed like a usual jock before he joined the army and shot a civilian in Afghanistan. Annie joins the dots after hearing all about him, and she tells Detective Brady about how Carlock’s service in the army and his time in prison match the period of Finster’s hiatus. When Brady and his partner Cody pay a visit to Carlock’s house, he refuses to talk to them and refers them to his lawyer right away. Annie and Reyna visit Vincent’s mother for clues about Carlock, but she pulls a gun on them when they start asking questions. Meanwhile, the murders continue, and Finster offers a twisted justification for every woman he kills.
Who is the Notorious Finster?
The threat of Vincent starts getting real when he confronts Annie and Reyna in a bar. Quick update: Reyna has influenced Annie to start drinking as well, but all they do is have some harmless fun conversations. In Reyna, Annie actually has a friend with whom she can talk without any inhibitions. So when Vincent behaves rudely, Reyna doesn’t hesitate to reply in the same tongue, eventually throwing a drink in his face. Vincent gets all mad and chokes Reyna up against the wall. The people in the club and Frank manage to separate Vincent and Reyna, but Vincent warns them both not to snoop around. Annie heads home to be shouted at by Roger, but Reyna shows up later at night at Annie’s with an injured head. Turns out, she was spying on Vincent, and she fell down a tree trying to do so. Roger tries to help Reyna, and she calls him the cable man who hates her. Roger immediately tells her that he has no hatred for her, and Annie takes her to the hospital. The next morning, when Annie is taking her home, Reyna tells her that she saw Roger heading to Vincent’s house in a uniform a cable man would wear.
Heading back home, Annie is followed by a car for quite a while, and she calls Reyna, worrying that Vincent might get to her again. Unfortunately, during the call, someone knocks at Reyna’s door, and Annie realizes she’s in danger from the screaming and shouting. When Annie goes to Reyna’s house, she finds Reyna’s body tied to a chair and her mutilated head in the fireplace. Annie is traumatized, and she lashes out at Brady for not doing better when she warned them. But the cops find that Vincent had hung himself, an apparent suicide. Annie is back home with Roger when he accidentally mentions Vincent hanging himself, and Annie picks up on that. She asks Roger how he got to know about it, and Roger fails to lie his way out of it. Unable to deflect the situation anymore, Roger admits that he’s the actual Notorious Finster.
Does Annie survive the Finster?
Handcuffed to the bed, Annie wakes up to realize the terrifying truth: the man she married is the same person she has spent a lifetime dreading. Roger apparently stopped killing when they married, but it’s disturbing how he got attracted to a writer who villainized him and his deeds. Roger keeps drugging Annie to keep her tame and explains to her how he had it all planned to frame Vincent before Reyna saw him as the cable man around his house. So Roger hacked into Vincent’s WiFi system to spy on his digital footprint and found what he expected: trolling, porn, and a lot of genital pictures. Roger catfished him into making him come two blocks away from one of his victims’ houses. While he was waiting to meet his dream girl, Roger was putting Vincent’s DNA all over the murder scene. His perfect plan only got ruined by Reyna, so he had to cut her head off, a perfectly understandable argument if you ask me.
Annie tries many things to set herself free, vomiting the drugs and sipping the liquid puke, using her bedpan to reflect sunlight to signal outsiders, and pulling and twisting her arms as much as possible. After trying relentlessly for days, she gets hold of a bottle of alcohol, and she hides it under her pillow. She has gotten raped in this time by Roger, who wants to believe that he loves her and she reciprocates the feeling. When Roger finally comes to kill her, she hits him with the bottle and manages to snatch the keys to uncuff herself. Roger screams at her because he wants to finish the job while she’s asleep, but now it’s a do-or-die situation for both of them. Annie jumps through a window, shattering the glass, but Roger catches her still. You’d think the bad guy can’t possibly win like this, and he doesn’t. Annie takes her hairpin out to stab him in the neck, killing the Notorious Finster for good. At the end of the movie, Annie is pregnant with Roger’s child, and she appears on a talk show. Annie doesn’t hold her unborn child accountable for their father’s actions, and she tells the host that even though Roger lived a double life, she saw the good in him.
