La nuit du 12
Pitch-black police thriller about the difficult investigation into the murder of a 21-year-old woman. The only thing that’s certain: Clara was murdered on the night of the 12th.
Every detective has a crime that won’t let him go. For Yohan, the brand-new police homicide chief in Grenoble, southern France, it is the gruesome murder of Clara Royer, a 21-year-old woman from a small Alpine village. Promising clues and apparent breakthroughs come to nothing time after time, much to the frustration of Yohan and his team.
However, director and co-screenwriter Dominik Moll does not use the action scenes that detective films usually rely on, but surprises with a hushed, sensitive approach. Between interrogations, he focuses his camera on the detectives; their conversations are about marital problems, unpaid overtime, and stalling printers. Those moments make the film realistic, but also gentle and poetic. At the same time, the search for the killer spills over into a larger, uneasy investigation into male chauvinism and violence in a society where women are seen as victims but also – as in Clara’s case – held responsible for their sexually promiscuous behaviour.