Direction: Dominik Moll
Country: France
German-born French director Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry, 2000; Only the Animals, 2019) confirms an extraordinary maturity in The Night of the 12th, painting with grippingly realistic touches and surgical precision the scenario of a crime investigation and the mental struggle that consumes two cops. The film, a slow-burning noir thriller that alerts for femicide, was adapted from a 50-page passage of the book 18.3 - Une année à la PJ (2020) by Pauline Guéna.
With a straight-line narration, this funeral fable turns our attention to brutal violence against women, rising above common trappings with the help of carefully modulated performances by Bastien Bouillon and Bouli Lanners. The former is Yohan, the newly appointed judiciary police captain in Grenoble, who gets obsessed with the case of a young woman burned alive in a small town; the latter is Marceau, an impulsive veteran officer going through a painful divorce.
Moll and his regular collaborator Gilles Marchand co-wrote the film with seriousness, making it less immediately stunning and sometimes hardly pleasurable to watch. Yet, this is a considerably impactful and realistic cinematic experience. The inexhaustible mystery persists in a story that, even wholly absorbing, is full of blank uneasiness. It can be frustrating to follow these cops, both locked in their solitude and lost in their leads.
