Certificate: 15 (very strong language, strong injury detail, violence, domestic abuse). Running Time: 114 mins. UK Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment
WHO’S IN IT?
Bastien Bouillon, Bouli Lanners, Anouk Grinberg, Pauline Serieys, Mouna Soualem, Lula Cotton-Frapier, Théo Cholbi, Johann Dionnet, Thibault Evrard, Julien Frison, Paul Jeanson, Camille Rutherford, Pierre Lottin
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Dominik Moll (director, writer), Gilles Marchand (writer), Caroline Benjo, Barbara Letellier and Carole Scotta (producers), Olivier Marguerit (composer), Patrick Ghiringhelli (cinematographer), Laurent Rouan (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A police detective (Bouillon) becomes obsessed with a brutal murder case…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH?
Perhaps the most frustrating thing for a policeman – other than the institutional racism, misogyny, corruption, bullying, frequent brutality, and the general lack of trust that most civilians have in them right now – is dealing with cases that, for one reason or another, have been left unsolved. So many loose ends, and very few actual leads, can torment anyone looking for some kind of closure, but when you’re put in charge of diving into said loose ends to try and connect the dots, it can be so much more taxing for one’s psyche, which to its credit The Night of the 12th does capture to a quietly intimidating degree.
The irony, though, is that watching the French crime thriller, from director and co-writer Dominik Moll, actually does reflect what it must feel like to be solving an unsolvable case: there’s tons of intriguing details to play around with, but ultimately it amounts to almost nothing noteworthy, leaving part of you to feel almost as if your time has been slightly wasted. Despite that, though, the film isn’t boring, and does raise some interesting queries that are at least worth a light discussion with others.
Beginning on the night of October 12th, 2016, fresh-faced Yohan Vivès (Bastien Bouillon) has just joined the ranks of a police force operating in Grenoble – where the mountains of the French Alps dominate the background – replacing the outgoing lead detective. The welcoming/retirement party is short-lived, though, as Yohan and his team are called to a suburban community where, that same night, a young woman named Clara Royer (Lula Cotton-Frapier) has been engulfed in flames by a masked assailant.
The ensuing murder investigation leads Yohan and other team members, including his older and wearier partner Marceau (Bouli Lanners), to piece together the facts in order to narrow down a prime suspect, who could be among the many male companions that Clara was said to have been involved with – but soon, Yohan, Marceau et al find themselves going nowhere with the case, leading to it becoming something of an obsession for some of them, which threatens to consume them as the flames did poor Clara.
The Night of the 12th plays out like a typical procedural, from the detectives learning of the crime, to investigating anyone and everyone who could be associated with the crime, all the way to digging deeper and deeper into the mystery to find out why such a crime occurred in the first place. However, the film grounds itself so much in reality that it barely feels like your standard self-contained episode of Law and Order or CSI, and more like how a heightened investigation like the ones on those shows would actually unfold.
This is partly due to the film being based on a section within the non-fiction crime book 18.3 – Une année à la PJ by Pauline Guéna, which details numerous other unsolved cases within the French police detective system, and thus gives The Night of the 12th some extra clout when it comes to depicting a much more realistic grind through the legal machines.
Here, there are no eleventh-hour reveals, no tense shoot-outs or chases, and with Luther: The Fallen Sun still on my mind there’s also no ludicrous bad guy with their own Bond villain lair; it’s just a bunch of guys slowly putting everything together, and whose biggest barrier is an ink cartridge leaking inside their printer.
You might be wondering how all of this amounts to a worthwhile theatrical experience, and truth be told there are times when The Night of the 12th runs the risk of feeling so slight that it feels bereft of an actual point, or seeming too obtuse when it tries to make one. As Bastien Bouillon’s Yohan and his boys-club gang of detectives confront numerous male would-be suspects, from socially awkward recluses to violent ex-offenders, much is made about the gender biases that come with a case like this, with the detectives making unconscious judgements about the female victim’s promiscuity as well as displaying an alpha-male persona when it comes to enacting vengeance on abusive partners.
However, the message is more often than not crow-barred in, without much in the way of subtlety or even a satisfying conclusion, for this is the kind of film that suddenly jumps years ahead without so much as a transition, and then simply stops rather than ends, leaving numerous narrative threads hanging alongside the unsolved case itself.
If telling this very grounded and realistic tale of routine police inspection doesn’t make for especially thrilling big-screen entertainment – and I can see most viewers coming away with the same empty feeling that the ones in my screening had – The Night of the 12th succeeds more in being a compelling enough study of obsession and frustration, with strong performances all around making the light but intense drama watchable despite its emptiness.
Some of the film’s most intense sequences involve the daily routines of the detectives themselves, such as Yohan speeding determinedly around a cycling track straight after a long day’s work, and the actors – including Bouillon and a sharp supporting turn by Bouli Lanners – sell those moments of intensity to where, after a while of seeing what they may be capable of, they almost become just as scary to watch as the masked assailant whose crime opens the movie.
As a whole, The Night of the 12th is uneven, working pretty well in some areas while failing to engage in others, but the main ingredients that it plays around with are at least interesting to ponder over, even if they largely end up going nowhere. In short, it really is the cinematic equivalent of an unsolved murder case, particularly ones that leave you both frustrated and lightly stimulated at the same time.
SO, TO SUM UP…
The Night of the 12th is an intriguing but ultimately uneven crime thriller that dramatizes a real-life unsolved murder case with a more grounded and realistic vibe than most other theatrical procedurals, but despite some solid performances the unsatisfying endpoints and overblown messaging leave it rather empty.
