Young men are disappearing off the streets of Louisiana, and the police can’t turn up a single body. In Shivaan Makker’s Hate Thyself, the question isn’t simply who is taking them, but how much of the darkness of the hunt takes over your soul.
Detective Angelo Matteo (Oscar Torre) is good at one thing: finding people who’ve gone missing. He’s also a man of deep faith, and that faith gets a real workout when he and his men raid a house and pull a young girl out alive. It’s one thing to rescue the killer’s hostage, but it’s another to delve into the sick and twisted minds of these people.
With each case coming to a close, Angelo starts to fall apart. The ghost of his brother keeps showing up, asking, “Why couldn’t you accept me?” His wife, Ashley, is worried sick. She wants kids, but even she can see the job is killing him. Things get bad enough that Angelo nearly “eats his gun,” and between that and the drinking, his boss, Marco Aurelio (Tony Todd), suspends him.
The timing of Angelo’s suspension couldn’t be worse because another killer (Happy Anderson) surfaces. His prey is young gay men who sell themselves on the street. He invites them in for paid sex, tortures them, and carves them up. Each kill is accompanied by memories of a tormenting mother who couldn’t stand that her son was an F-word.
Detective Angelo Matteo holds a flask at sunset in Hate Thyself.
“The timing of Angelo’s suspension couldn’t be worse because another killer surfaces.”
What stands out in Hate Thyself is its tone. Dark is an understatement as you walk down this long road to depravity. Angelo is the cop who wants to do good, but the world he chooses to exact justice in is dirty and is slowly dragging him to hell.
Working from Sullivan McGuffin’s script, Makker holds nothing back, making us a fly on the wall inside the killer’s mind and his sadistic torture. You’ll find no sunshine or lollipops here. It’s brutal, but thankfully, it pulls its punches on how graphic things could have really gotten.
Hate Thyself is an appropriate title for this film. On the surface, the film deals with the self-loathing that can accompany being gay in the South. Angelo’s guilt stems from his brother’s death and his own refusal to accept that his brother was gay. It’s this shame and guilt that becomes the underlying motive of our killers. This kind of thriller is not always my cup of tea, but its dark tone is effective… almost too effective.
Shivaan Makker’s Hate Thyself is a grim, unflinching look at how shame and guilt poison both the killer and the detective chasing him. It rarely lets you come up for air before the next soul is taken. It’s not an easy watch, but if you can stomach it, Hate Thyself will be almost impossible to shake off.
"…Dark is an understatement…this long road to depravity."
