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.
In a sickeningly convincing moment of plausible chaos, Yohan messes up the vital professional moment of breaking the news to Clara’s distraught mother: he loses the thread while he is speaking, and dries up, like an amateur actor. But there is a specific reason for it: an existential crisis which is to haunt him throughout. Clara has had many boyfriends, it turns out, with a rumoured taste for “bad boys” (the cue for much tasteless sexist comment from the more unreconstructed members of the team). There are any number of possible suspects, including one grotesque character who actually recorded a rap on YouTube threatening to kill Clara in exactly the way she was murdered. But could it be a copycat killing?
This film is engrossing because it shows the life of the two officers in parallel with the case, a story which could almost exist independently of the crime under investigation. Marceau is heading for a breakdown; his wife has left him and he is obsessed with abandoning the police force in favour of an alternative career of teaching French literature. Meanwhile, the clearly dysfunctional Yohan is disgusted with his colleagues’ misogynist attitudes, but mollified by the arrival of a smart, young female officer: this is Nadia (played by Mouna Soualem, from Dina Amer’s You Resemble Me).
There is something very mysterious and unnerving about this film, like Bong Joon-ho’s Korean classic Memories of Murder: a study of what it means not to know, not to solve, not to find the eternal verities of narrative and the sense of an ending, which every movie and TV show and novel says must be there. What does it do to a cop’s soul not only to be confronted with the brutalities of crime, but also with the void, with the absence of an explanation, that boundary wall of disclosure to make sense of the experience? Memories of Murder actually inspired a solution to its case; perhaps The Night of the 12th could do the same. Either way, it’s a brutally engrossing drama.
• The Night of the 12th is released on 31 March in UK cinemas, and is available on digital platforms in Australia.
