French film-maker Dominik Moll has given us a gripping true-crime procedural, a desolate study of the ubiquity of evil and misogynist violence and the abyss of unknowing into which everyone finds themselves gazing: crime victims, relatives and the police themselves. And crime in the real world is often not bounded by the Agatha Christie conventions of clearcut motives and culprits unmasked.
Moll and screenwriter Gilles Marchand have fictionalised a real case recounted by the French author Pauline Guéna in her 2020 eyewitness reportage book 18.3: Une Année à la PJ, for which she was embedded for a year with France’s Police Judiciaire (equivalent to the UK’s CID); 18.3 being that part of the French penal code which governs their existence. On a certain ominous night in 2016, a young woman called Clara (Lula Cotton-Frapier) leaves a house after dark where she had been hanging out with her friend, Stéphanie (Pauline Serieys), and impulsively records a video in the street on her phone saying how much she loves her – and is then horrifyingly slaughtered by an unseen assailant. A team of cops is assigned to her case, led by the new chief Yohan (Bastien Bouillon) and a moody, careworn older officer Marceau (Bouli Lanners). One of the first things that the forensic squad naturally have to do is delicately bag up Clara’s smartphone, a precious vessel of potentially useful information (including that video) and, fundamentally, her digital soul, a repository of her entire identity.
