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 extends that late-career run of cool, exacting crime cinema. Premiering in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, it takes as its subject 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 determine 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 resist the easy heat of the thriller in favour of 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; Patrick Ghiringhelli's chilly cinematography keeps the city at a procedural remove.

The film was widely praised as among Moll's strongest, and the recognition followed: Drucker won the César and the Lumière Award for Best Actress, with eight César nominations in all, plus a European Film Award nod. More than a case study, it is a measured interrogation of how a state investigates its own — and of what it costs the person asked to do the investigating.