Just a Guy
2020 · 15m · Alemania
Directed by Shoko Hara
Genres: animation, crime, documentary
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Three women describe their affection for Richard Ramirez, the serial killer they contacted after his conviction in the 1980s. Through their letters, obsessive emotions take unsettling, familiar forms.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most documentaries about serial killers traffic in moral certainty or lurid spectacle—Hara does something genuinely unsettling by treating the women's letters as *real* emotional testimony, letting you sit in the cognitive dissonance without rescue. It's a premise that makes you defend what you're watching, which is exactly where the best subversive work lives.
Hara positions herself in a rigorous lineage of essay-documentary and animated testimony, using the formal constraint of rotoscoped letters to create distance and dignity where sensationalism would be easier. The measured pacing and refusal of conventional narrative climax suggests a filmmaker thinking through form as ethics.
The decision to animate the letters rather than read them over still footage—to make the handwriting itself the image—is the hinge that transforms what could be tabloid material into something genuinely probing about obsession and projection. It's a small formal choice that does all the heavy lifting.