Dominik Moll’s The Night of the 12th, a depressing murder mystery with a lacuna at its center, seems to have aspirations of being a Gallic take on David Fincher’s Zodiac. A fictionalized account of a real-life news story, and adapting some 30 pages from Pauline Guéna’s book 18.3 – A Year with the Crime Squad, the film features a horrifying crime, a slew of possible suspects, and baffled investigators who just cannot stop running into dead ends.
The film begins not with the crime but a retirement party. A crime squad in southeastern France is saying goodbye to their affable old boss. His replacement, Yohan (Bastien Bouillon), is more of an anxiety-riddled straight arrow, with seemingly little life outside the precinct but riding his bike in circles at the local velodrome. His partner, Marceau (Bouli Lanners), is somewhat less icy but still no party: On the verge of an ugly divorce, he’s given to quoting Verlaine and complaining about the state of the world. When the two men get the call to investigate a murder in Grenoble, the scene is set for their already dark-seeming lives to get that much darker.
Moll shoots the crime itself with crisp, chilly precision. Clara (Lula Cotton-Frapier), a carefree-seeming 21-year-old, is walking home from a friend’s house late at night when a masked man approaches her. First dousing her with some kind of clear inflammatory liquid, he flicks a cigarette lighter and turns her into a human torch. Except for an emotionally gutting moment when Yohan and Marceau break the news to Clara’s parents (Charline Paul and Matthieu Rozé), the first stages of the investigation are rendered in a similarly clipped, straightforward manner.
Assuming, and with seemingly good reason, that the killer is a man motivated by revenge, Yohan and Marceau interview a string of Clara’s ex-boyfriends and lovers. Most are awful in slightly different ways and present at least one good reason to make them a suspect, from the smirking Jules (Jules Porier), who laughs at a joke a friend told about Clara’s death, to the quasi-skinhead with the domestic violence charge, Vincent (Pierre Lottin), to the wannabe musician, Gabi (Nathanaël Beausivoir), who recorded a break-up rap about burning Clara alive. Many of the suspects show a shrugging indifference to Clara’s murder that combines with a paucity of evidence to psychologically and spiritually undermine the detectives.
The murder’s over-the-top cruelty and the withholding of any fittingly grandiose story behind it creates an eerie imbalance not only for Yohan and Marceau but for the film itself. Initially, Moll and co-screenwriter Gilles Marchand sustain the balancing act by having the detectives play out vague ideas for the killers’ motivation. Most center on the culprit being a misogynist. But in an interesting development, once Yohan and Marceau see other detectives insinuate that Clara’s sex life caused her murder, the film seems to suggest that suspicion and hatred of women is so widespread here that misogyny is no longer useful as a sorting mechanism. “Something is wrong between men and women,” Yohan notes, underlining the point with a mournful certitude.
The investigation’s frustrating dead ends and years-long scope recall Zodiac. In both films, leads are run down with a diligent frustration, promising breaks quickly dissipate, and eventually the world moves on except for an obsessed loner who cannot give up the ghost. In The Night of the 12th, though, the filmmakers seem to have made the conscious decision to not bathe their world in a noir sheen. Patrick Ghiringhelli’s shimmering yet naturalistic cinematography keeps being drawn to the beautiful surroundings, with the pristine majesty of the Alps acting as an almost ironic backdrop for the grimy human realities at play in the foreground.
But even though it conveys a moody tension without many of the tropes common to detective thrillers (chases, threatening phone calls, new victims, media hype), the film doesn’t replace them with deeper characterizations or a closer detailing of criminal procedure. After Marceau departs the film well before its end and Yohan is left holding together the investigation, you may find yourself missing his presence. Even the older cop’s laments, despite being in the self-serious key of True Detective’s sense of existentialism (“We fight evil by writing reports,” he says at one point), brought needed texture to a narrative that flattens out in its later stretches.
As well-crafted as The Night of the 12th is, Yohan’s transition from uptight stickler in a murder mystery to slightly more morose uptight stickler striving to escape his obsession in a psychoanalytical message drama isn’t quite as interesting a trajectory as the filmmakers seem to think it is. All the while, Bouillon’s buttoned-up performance gives too little away. There’s no easy payoff here, and the suggestion that there might be one for Yohan should be ameliorating but would have required his first being made a character of interest.
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