News
CASE 137
Media:
Dominik Moll's Riveting Police Procedural Places Good Cop and Bad Cop on Opposite Sides.
Léa Drucker is superb as a dogged inspector investigating an egregious case of riot police misconduct in this starkly effective Cannes competition entry.
"Why does everyone hate the police?" It's a fair and earnest question, lobbed halfway through "Case 137" by 12-year-old Victor (Solan Machado Graner) at his mother Stéphanie (Léa Drucker) - who has a hard time coming up with a satisfactory answer, not least because she's in the police herself. "It's not a likable job," she eventually admits. "Enforcing the law doesn't make you friends." He doesn't know the half of it. Stéphanie is no standard cop, but an investigator in the French IGPN (internal affairs) department, making professional enemies left and right as she investigates various cases of police brutality and misconduct - while outside the force, she finds herself tarred by the same ACAB brush as those she's bringing to account. Not that Dominik Moll's clear-eyed, fuss-free and entirely gripping procedural drama asks viewers to shed any tears for her: Personal integrity ultimately counts for little in service of a crooked institution.
After a few years off the French auteur A-list, Moll enjoyed a surge in acclaim (and swept last year's César Awards) with his 2023 film "The Night of the 12th" - an ostensibly straightforward true-crime policier that revealed more intricately ambiguous moral layers as it unfolded. It was a more sober and stringent genre exercise than the playful Hitchcock homages with which he made his name in the early 2000s, and the change evidently agreed with him. "Case 137," premiering as Moll's first Cannes competition entry since 2005's "Lemming," ventures even more tautly into pure procedural territory, probing one fictional (but compositely fact-inspired) case involving corrupt Search and Investigation Brigade (or BRI) officers to the very bitter end, with little in the way of sensationalism or sentimentality, but a surprisingly pointed sidebar on cat videos.
By Guy Lodge. Variety
READ MORE: 'Case 137' Review: Dominik Moll's Riveting Police Procedural
