(Credit: Haute et Court)

Director Dominik Moll, known for the 2013 TV series The Tunnel, has made a breakthrough with his latest production, a dark, thoughtful police procedural and murder mystery set in a picturesque northern French town near Grenoble. When screened at Cannes, The Night of the 12th won three Césars as well as two Lumiere awards. The moody, atmospheric film achieves a perfect balance between portraying the highs, lows, and practical challenges of police work and capturing the emotional turmoil and confusion involved in dealing with a particularly disturbing and puzzling murder. In the process, the script touches on larger issues, including the thread of misogyny running through even the most outwardly benign society. It is a film that challenges the boundaries of conventional crime drama in unexpected ways.

The central event is a horrific murder: a young woman, walking home at night, is doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire for no apparent reason. The murder victim, Clara (Lula Cotton-Frapier), reappears in flashbacks throughout the film, ensuring that she remains a full and complex individual, not merely a name. A close-knit team of police investigators are followed as they sift through evidence and interview suspects – a disturbingly large number of plausible suspects, but none more likely than another to have committed the crime. The story is a genuine police procedural, following the details of the investigation, gathering physical evidence and data, and revealing the investigators’ strategies. However, it also delves into the lives and personalities of the individual members and how they influence the team’s approach with their particular strengths or weaknesses, including the dynamics of older, more experienced detectives working with new recruits. Moll worked with casting directors to ensure that the cast were not only excellent actors but worked believably as a team and could provide a family-like energy – which they decidedly do. It is at first easy to overlook the fact that the squad is entirely male until it is brought to our attention. Given the running theme of violence against women, the periodic introduction of significant female characters marks a change in perception and the story’s direction without interfering with the crime plotline.

The detailed look at the inner workings of these investigators comes from the original material on which the script is based, a novel by Pauline Guéna, Une Année a la PJ (‘A Year With The Crime Squad’). The novelist spent a year following the criminal brigade of the French police to research the work, drawing from multiple murder cases and their aftermath. The director and his co-screenwriter Gilles Marchand adapted a thirty-page passage from Guéna’s novel into a script. The result is not only an engrossing crime drama but a group character study featuring an ensemble cast of distinct individuals, as well as a believable team effort, especially important when dealing with the emotional impact of the murder case on the police. The account is held together by the central character and captain of the squad Yohan, played with admirable subtlety by Bastien Gouillon, who serves to unify the police efforts and to absorb and reflect the various reactions of other team members.

But The Night of the 12th goes deeper than the crime in question, delving into questions of violence, guilt, and the nature of evil. More specifically, it deals with examples of misogyny in various forms, which continue to emerge in the course of the investigation. The police investigators are initially frustrated by the many suspects in Clara’s murder and their inability to find compelling evidence against any one of them, but the case becomes more distressing as they begin to realise that any of the suspects, and perhaps any of hundreds of men in their vicinity, could conceivably have committed this murder. The police initially brush off a young witness’ suggestion that Clara was killed “because she’s a girl,” but as time passes, the investigators come to fear she may be right and acknowledge that anti-female violence may be more common than they had believed. “Something’s amiss between men and women,” Captain Yohan muses. These ideas are given an effective airing when Yohan encounters women involved in the case: a judge who reopens the cold investigation; a friend of Clara’s (Pauline Serieys) who challenges the detectives’ assumptions; and the sole female squad member, Nadia (Mouna Soualem), who offers a fresh but depressing perspective on both criminals and police.

The Night of the 12th deviates from the typical police drama in that successfully tracking down the guilty party is not the climax of the story, as would be expected. This is by design: Moll expressed the view that there is “something unique and compelling about an unsolved case”; that finding no solution “can help us to ask questions that are perhaps more profound, more challenging.” In terms of crime-solving, the actual investigation winds down into a swamp of hopelessness. Instead, the characters deal with the often frightening or disturbing truths suggested by Clara’s murder and begin to ask questions which had not occurred to them before – with various results, including the sentimental Marceau (Bouli Lanners), a likeable older investigator who struggles with the feeling that his job is making him hateful.

The look of the film is oddly compelling. Moll credits the advice of cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli, whose technical choices give even indoor or crowd scenes a ‘wide open’ and less claustrophobic feel, making the few but well-chosen close-ups, including during the murder itself, all the more significant. The location also provides a striking contrast between the grisly murder and investigation, and the extravagantly beautiful landscape of the area, a picturesque town with the Alps in the background. Other well-chosen shots add to the story, such as Yohan’s compulsive, ‘therapeutic’ bicycle riding around an enclosed track “like a hamster” or the pitiful shots of the impromptu shrine erected on the site of Clara’s death. Perfectly setting off the entire production is an unobtrusive, quietly melancholy score by established soundtrack composer Olivier Marguerit.

Despite the gruesomeness of the central murder and the painful ideas that rise out of the investigation, this is a surprisingly optimistic film. Yohan, representing his entire squad, is seen to draw wisdom and growth out of the horror and darkness he encounters, and the film concludes with a great deal unresolved but with a general feeling of hope. The film’s central mood, which the director terms “existential anxiety”, is uncomfortable but not, it’s implied, without its beneficial effects.