The Golden Glove

The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh, 2019) is Fatih Akin's grim crime thriller, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It drops you into a smoke-stained Hamburg dive bar in the early 1970s, where lonely drinkers waste their nights beside a man none of them suspects.

Fritz Honka is a hunched, drink-ruined laborer who lures isolated older women out of the bar and up to his cramped attic flat. Akin refuses to look away from what happens next; the camera stays in that reeking room long past the point of comfort. Jonas Dassler vanishes under heavy prosthetics, turning a real Hamburg murderer from the police files into something at once pitiful and unbearable.

Adapted from Heinz Strunk's novel, the film walks a razor's edge between black comedy and horror, never letting genre soften the blow. This is heavy, physical, deeply unpleasant cinema — not a crowd-pleaser — yet few films capture the squalor and despair of post-war Germany's underclass with this little flinching. Stream The Golden Glove (2019) online on iFILM.