Our take
The opening titles of this French procedural drama explicitly tell us that the crime it chronicles will go unsolved, confessing that it’s about one of the approximately 160 murder cases that police don’t crack each year. An ambitious and intriguing opener — suggesting that, in the absence of a clean resolution, the film will nonetheless offer us something equally compelling, as Zodiac does.
In following the investigation of the brutal murder of 21-year-old Clara (Lula Cotton-Frapier) — for which the police interrogate various of her exes, all misogynistic potential murderers in their own ways — the film seeks to explore the society-wide “problem between men and women” that has given the police its surplus of suspects. Alas, it’s much more interested in the psychological impact cold cases have on policemen like frustrated captain Yohan (Bastien Bouillon). There’s something deeply ironic about making a movie about the systemic dehumanization of women just to center male perspectives, especially when their only insight into the epidemic of toxic masculinity is Yohan’s clunky “We can’t find the murderer because all men killed Clara.” The film’s treatment of the victim herself — incurious and downright gratuitous in the depiction of her murder — cements it as a shallow, un-self-aware, and failed attempt to reckon with a subject that deserved its full focus.
The story
Young and ambitious Captain Vivés has just been appointed group leader at the Grenoble Criminal Squad when Clara's murder case lands on his desk. Vivés and his team investigate Clara's complex life and relations, but what starts as a professional and methodical immersion into the victim's life soon turns into a haunting obsession.
Elsewhere
"Not revolutionary, but competent and compelling."
— Saskia Lloyd Gaiger
"Its real-world mysteries eventually become existential ones, but the film never stops sending chills up your spine."
— Bilge Ebiri
A police captain is tormented by his fruitless investigation into the brutal murder of a young woman.
The most interesting character in the film is Yohan’s middle-aged partner Marceau (Bouli Lanners), a workaholic on the brink of divorce as a result of his wife’s infidelity. From his gruff aura and troubled home life, it'd be easy to assume he’d be one of the worst culprits in the police department’s band of boorish victim-blamers, but neither Marceau nor Yohan is anything of the sort. While the former is left to exist as a hollow perfect feminist hero, though, Lanners makes up for that central lack of depth with his rich characterization of a man genuinely agonized and infuriated by all the apathy he witnesses during the investigation. It’s to its own detriment that The Night of the 12th sidelines him partway through its runtime.
This six-time César winner is, unwittingly, a depressing example of male mediocrity itself.
The details
Who picked it
Farah Cheded is a UK-based curator at A Good Movie to Watch and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved freelance critic whose work has been published at outlets including The Playlist, Paste Magazine, and Film School Rejects. She lives in fear of the day she runs out of 'Columbo' episodes to watch.
