THE SERPENT: Portrait of a Serial Killer Who Wasn’t Mad

Films about serial killers enjoy quite a decent popularity, nevertheless I doubt whether The Serpent will be one of those titles that will be much talked about. It is a really good series, however it has a certain inherent flaw – the activity of the so-called Bikini Killer, that is Charles Sobhraj, does not quite mesh with our culture. And this is important in the perception of serial killers who gain popularity in specific social circles.

Sobhraj murdered too far away, and besides, his activity as a serial killer may be called into question, for example due to the additionally occurring motives of robbery as well as quite a large, as for a psychopathic criminal, number of people who helped him in this.

Although the Bikini Killer fails in terms of a serial killer profile, the series The Serpent contains plenty of other, interesting references which are worth recalling for example before the start of the tourist season. In this sense, it is a universal series.

I will encourage viewers to watch individual episodes very carefully. The plot is conducted non-linearly.

The creators wanted to present the personality of Charles Sobhraj in a multi-faceted way, as well as the very difficult work of uncovering his activities by the employee of the Dutch embassy Herman Knippenberg. After two episodes the threads fortunately begin to connect, creating a story full of games with the viewer, perfectly reflecting the personality of The Serpent.

As for the stereotype of a serial killer recorded in our viewers’ minds, the Bikini Killer was not too spectacular. He killed cleanly, usually poisoning his victims with large doses of medications and drugs. Moreover, for a psychopath, he behaved strangely, as he was the boss of a gang of people who earned money by depriving tourists of their lives.

Indeed, some victims served to camouflage the identities of other, more important from the point of view of the interest, victims, but still, looking from the outside, the motive of robbery seemed the main one.

The Bikini Killer, a man without an identity, without a nationality, lost from childhood between Vietnam and India, always wanted to live like a magnate.

He envied the rich, while at the same time despised them. He did not start with murders. First there were thefts – burglaries, smuggling, extortion, etc. Only later, as his appetite for a certain defined lifestyle grew, came the murders. Generally, when looking at the series image of Sobhraj, one gets the impression that at a certain point in his life, when in Saigon he gathered around him a group of devoted so-called friends with white skin, he began to play the role of a guru leading a sect. In this respect too, he escaped the standard image of a serial killer created by films and television.

The series The Serpent presented him, as I already mentioned, in a multi-faceted way.

Some may say that even not very spectacularly. He is a murderer, but at the same time he is a swindler, simply a bad, cunning man. There is nothing in him that would place him in the pantheon of the most terrible, insane killers. Perhaps the way he was shown in the series had an influence on this? There are few scenes of the murders themselves. When they do happen, the narrative puts little emphasis on the psychopathic motives of the perpetrator’s actions. Rather, he and his camarilla at all costs want on the one hand to profit from the victims, and on the other to hide their activity.

The initial mystery, so strongly outlined in the series, gradually dissolves somewhere, leaving on the stage a fairly standard criminal-swindler with a tendency to kill. So one does not wait for the end with the feeling that there will be a surprise. The Serpent is a technically well-executed production built on retrospection. Each of them, along with the action taking place in the present, brings something new. We watch the action from several different points of view, which is in itself a very interesting device.

We learn more and more about the intrigues of the criminal, who was brilliantly played by the French actor of Algerian descent Tahar Rahim. It is essentially his series, his stage. One can therefore turn a blind eye to all those hints when the atmosphere changes, and the faces of the actors directly suggest what is about to happen. It is all too clear, depriving the viewer of independent reflection. This, however, is a detail, while the whole is a wisely planned entertainment breaking stereotypes. We will learn, for example, that contrary to circulating opinions, by robbing hippies traveling in the Far East, one can make quite a lot of money.

In general, the hippies were presented in the film as a gang of drugged, white kids who broke free from the leash of their rich parents. Not a very diplomatic move, regardless of how much truth it contains. The invaluable value of The Serpent is, however, the warning, should anyone have forgotten, that when going on crazy trips, especially in order to seek drug-induced highs at foreign parties, one should not trust strangers, especially those as directly nice as the Bikini Killer. When watching his exploits from the viewer’s perspective, it is sometimes hard to believe that strangers let themselves be fooled.

After all, he did not immediately drug anyone. Could it be that he was so perfectly able to select from among thousands of hippies precisely those who were the most naive?

The Serpent is undoubtedly an interesting series about a serial killer who was not insane, as insane villains usually are. I feel that the creators did not manage to get to the true motivation of the Bikini Killer, although I respectfully admit that they tried at all costs.