THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH
Director: Dominik Moll
Cast: Bastien Bouillon, Bouli Lanners, Theo Cholbi, Johann Dionnet, Thibaut Evrard, Julien Frison, Paul Jeanson, Pauline Serieys, Mouna Soualem, Anouk Grinberg
Rating: (M) ★★★★
REVIEWED BY JEREMY QUINN
The opening title-card of the excellent procedural thriller The Night of the 12th (Rialto) states that every year the French police open up to 800 murder investigations, of which nearly 20% go unsolved. That the film is based on one of these real-life cases lets you know from the beginning there won’t be any nicely tied-up, TV-style resolutions this time.
Adapted from a book by Pauline Guena, 18.3 - A Year With the Crime Squad, which recounts her experiences being immersed in the Versailles CID, writer Gilles Marchand and writer-director Dominik Moll have narrowed their focus to a single story, the murder of a young woman set on fire while walking home.
Although the location has been moved from Paris to the town of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, presumably to make use of the oppressive, mountainous atmosphere, and the team of investigators from nearby Grenoble are fictional or composite characters, albeit drawn from meticulous research, the general facts remain the same.
It centres around newly appointed head detective Yohan (Bastien Bouillon), who becomes gradually more affected by the inscrutable, haunting nature of the crime, and his jaded, older partner Marceau (Bouli Lanners), who has begun to realise the job is filling him with hate.
As the mostly male detectives work through a roll call of all-male suspects, any of whom could be capable of murder, the key theme of the film is made staggeringly and heartbreakingly clear - that there is something deeply amiss between men and women that may never be solved.
