The Night of the 12th

Dominik Moll adapted a chapter of Pauline Guéna's 18.3: Une année à la PJ, a year the journalist spent embedded with the French judicial police, and made the best French crime film in years. It premiered at Cannes in 2022 and then won the César for Best Film, along with Best Director and Most Promising Actor for Bastien Bouillon.

Clara is killed walking home from a friend's house in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. Yohan, newly promoted to lead the Grenoble squad, takes the case with his older colleague Marceau, played by Bouli Lanners. They interview the boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend, the man she had a fling with, the one who wrote her a song, the one who filmed her. Every single one is a plausible suspect, and the accumulating portrait is not of a killer but of the ordinary contempt that surrounded a twenty-one-year-old woman. Moll opens with a title card stating that a proportion of French homicide cases are never solved.

What lifts it above procedural is the film's steady refusal to give the audience the resolution the genre has trained it to expect, and its interest in what an unsolved case does to the men investigating it. Yohan cycles round a velodrome at night; Marceau falls apart. Critics called it the most quietly furious French film about violence against women of its decade.