‘The Night of the 12th’ (‘La Nuit du 12’): Film Review | Cannes 2022

A brooding, serpentine investigative drama that brings to mind movies like Zodiac and Memories of Murder, though on a more intimate scale, writer-director Dominik Moll’s The Night of the 12^th (La Nuit du 12) follows two hardened French detectives trying to solve a gruesome murder that constantly eludes their clutches.

Backed by the well-matched duo of Bastien Bouillon and Bouli Lanners, playing a good cop-bad cop team whose lives are overcome by a case that gets colder as the weeks and months go by, this taut and piercing thriller is one of Moll’s stronger works to date, using a genre template to delve into issues of violence, gender and policing in contemporary France. It opens theatrically at home after debuting in the Cannes Première section, where it could attract some international attention.

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Based on Pauline Guéna’s non-fiction book, 18.3 – Une année à la PJ, the film adapts just one section of a sprawling 500-page immersive look at the police judiciaire, which is the French equivalent of a police department’s detective bureau. (Guéna’s book was in part inspired by David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.)

Moll and regular cowriter Gilles Marchand decided to focus on a single case in 18.3, which followed the killing of a teenage girl, Clara (Lula Cotton Frapier), whose body was found scorched to death in an otherwise tranquil suburban community. The real story took place outside of Paris, but Moll transplants the action to the outskirts of Grenoble at the foot of the French Alps, which gives his film a setting at once more epic and isolated, framing events against a monumental backdrop devoid of people.

The film opens with Clara’s murder, where she’s doused in gasoline and lit aflame by an unknown assailant while walking home late at night from a party. The next day, the young and ambitious Yohan (Bouillon), who’s taken over as the bureau’s lead detective, and his older and more aggrieved partner, Marceau (Lanners), pick up the trail of a case that will send them on a long and labyrinthine quest to find the culprit.

As they track down and question suspects, all of them men ranging from their teens to their 30s, and all of whom had intimate relations with Clara, the search spills over into a larger examination of male violence in a society where women are both victims and, in Clara’s case, held responsible for their sexually promiscuous behavior.

The plot shifts between the manhunt and the world of the police precinct, which is very much a man’s world as well, with only one female detective, Nadia (Mouna Soualem), joining the squad late in the game. Moll spends time exploring the macho camaraderie of the cops, but also unearths their glowering vulnerability — especially when it comes to Marceau, whose wife leaves him at the start of the movie.

This creates a fair amount of tension between the cop and the various suspects he questions, whom he tends to see as surrogates for his ex-wife’s lover. And it also brings him to clash with Yohan, who’s exceedingly steely and distanced. The performances echo this dichotomy, with the usually deadpan Lanners flying off the handle several times, while Bouillon brings to mind the reserved, slightly offbeat antics of Jonathan Groff in David Fincher’s Mindhunter.

The Netflix series comes to mind as well in the film’s most riveting sequences, which are not action set-pieces but rather long interrogation scenes where Yohan and Marceau try to get one of their many suspects to confess. Each time they hit a wall, whether it be mundane (a spoiled teen who sees Clara as just another conquest), amusing and disturbing (a rapper from the projects who, out of jealousy, recorded a song about setting Clara on fire) or more overtly problematic (an older man with a record of domestic violence who engaged in aggressive sexual acts with the girl).

“The problem is that any one of them could have done it,” Yohan remarks at one point out of frustration with the case, though he’s speaking more generally about a world where men are often the perpetrators and women the targets. He grows obsessed with Clara’s murder the more its mystery evades him — a sentiment that Moll illustrates by having the cop race his bike in circles around the track of an outdoor velodrome, like a hamster running on a wheel but forever staying in place.

The Night of the 12^th lags as the investigation fans out over several years, though the tension comes back to haunt us when a judge (Anouk Grinberg) gives Yohan the go-ahead for one final push to solve the crime. The film ultimately feels smaller and more restrained than the works by Fincher or Bong Joon-ho, but in a similar fashion, it probes the social and moral breakdown that such a heinous unresolved killing represents.

Like Moll’s other movies, including his breakout debut With a Friend Like Harry… and his well-received recent thriller Only the Animals, the technical credits are impeccable, from Patrick Ghiringhelli’s lensing to a score by Olivier Marguerit (Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle) that keeps the suspense level high. Alongside the two leads, the supporting cast of cops and potential culprits is a mix of unfamiliar yet highly credible faces, grounding the action in a gritty and disquieting reality.

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