Fassbinder drew on a true story of a fellow who was driven to murder a man he didn't know but who looked like his father. Peter (Vitus Zeplichal) is a depressed bricklayer who becomes a kind of shockworker on behalf of mortgage and wife, mistakenly believing he must buy even her love. Probing Peter's past, and his hardworking and cruelly if normally unappreciative parents, the film shows why. Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman wrote: “I Only Want You to Love Me is enlivened by the blank reaction shots, stagy mise-en-scène, and endless parody of German uptightness that are Fassbinder trademarks. . . . What's most powerful about the movie is also what's most banal: the source of Peter's rage is his traumatic family romance. . . . Fassbinder based (the film) on interviews with convicted killers but informed it with memories of his own unhappy childhood.”