Case 137

Dominik Moll arrived in the French mainstream with the Hitchcockian unease of With a Friend Like Harry (2000) and returned to the front rank two decades later with The Night of the 12th (2022), a procedural that swept the Césars. Case 137 continues that late run of cool, exacting crime cinema. It premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and its subject is one of the rawest wounds in recent French public life: the police violence that marked the Gilets Jaunes protests.

Léa Drucker plays Stéphanie Bertrand, an IGPN investigator assigned to find out who fired the round that maimed a young protester. Moll and his regular co-writer Gilles Marchand build the film as patient detection (interviews, blurred footage, conflicting testimony), and they pass up the easy heat of the thriller for the grinding friction of bureaucracy and conscience. Drucker, one of the finest screen actors working in France, holds the centre with a watchful restraint that the camera trusts completely, and Patrick Ghiringhelli's chilly cinematography keeps the city at a procedural distance.

Critics counted it among Moll's strongest films, and the awards followed: Drucker won the César and the Lumière Award for Best Actress, the film collected eight César nominations in all, and it earned a European Film Award nomination. It is a measured interrogation of how a state investigates its own, and of what that costs the person asked to do the investigating.