Sam P.’s review published on Letterboxd:
FINGERS is a far more complex, cold, and prickly film than most will bother to realize, dismissing it as 'strange,' 'schizophrenic', or even 'messy.' In fact, it is none of those pejorative, distempered adjectives. It took me more than a single viewing to align with its wavelength, but it is a kind of subtle, modern Jeckyll and Hyde story. Keitel is both Jeckyll and Hyde, or has both within him, as both a virtuoso piano player and a fearsome (and feared) debt collector. Behind both personalities is a will and desire to please each of his parents, his mentally ill mother with his piano talents and his bookie / hustler father by threatening and taking lives. Neither parent understands or accepts the other's ideal - his mother is in denial about the father's livelihood and his father makes fun of his musical pursuits, calling him horrible, vulgar names. Hence the parents' separation/divorce (mostly unspoken), I would assume. FINGERS is a deeply painful narrative, a story about a young man's failure in all worldly things except wanton violence and who, in an attempt to please his parents, forgets to formulate his own wants, needs, desire: the Jimmy Fingers (Harvey Keitel) character lacks that most human characteristic, a self.