The Night of the 12th (2023)

Based on a case from journalist Pauline Guena's 2020 non-fiction book '18.3 – Une année à la PJ', in which she spent a year with the french police judiciaire, The Night of the 12th is a grim police procedural surrounding the murder of a young woman. The film opens with said haunting murder of Clara, who has just left her friend's house and begins her walk home, only to be brutally assaulted by a figure wearing a balaclava who throws petrol on her and then sets her alight. The stark slo-mo footage of Clara running ablaze past a children's playground is an image we're reminded of repeatedly throughout the film, as new police chief Yohan sets about attempting to solve the murder with his team, spooked by visions of the potential perpetrators and visions of Clara herself. What works very well here is director Dominik Moll's approach to pacing, and the low-key handling of the film. There's no over-fraught score pummeling your senses and telling you how to feel, nor is there an inevitable feel about the films' ending; this could end one of several ways, and it's only right at the very end that the audience fully realise where it's going; something that might sound obvious, but is frequently missing from whodunit style dramas. Where Moll's film works less well is in it's easy comparisons with admittedly more complete projects. David Fincher's Zodiac (2007) looms large here, a film that whilst perhaps divergent to this one in the sense that it surrounds a serial killer, nevertheless captures the hunt for a murderer over a significant period of time rather spectacularly. The Night of the 12th at one stage jumps forward three years, rendering the original pursuit rather defunct and asking the audience to immediately settle into a new format of attack; this request also at a time when the films' remaining runtime is lingering, leaving viewers suddenly separated from proceedings. Yohan's visions as he thinks in bed are also a misstep, seeing his face superimposed onto the many suspects pulls us out of what had up until that point been a gripping, if quiet, whodunit. We know who the potential suspects are, we don't need to be reminded visually. The Night of the 12th also suffers slightly coming a few years after the conclusion of the exceptional television series Spiral (or 'Engrenages') that ran from 2005 until 2020. Of course in the format that's available to Spiral, there's more time to flesh out characters and story, but from a personal point of view I'm completely engaged with the characters in Spiral, whereas the players in The Night of the 12th left me cold, certainly with regards to Yohan himself. There's no shirking the discussion regarding gender that permeates The Night of the 12th; Clara's best friend accuses Yohan of judging Clara for the amount of men she's slept with and focusing his investigation on that rather than asking questions about her personally. This instigates another rather hammy misstep in which Yohan says nothing, goes back to the office and then attacks a fellow officer when he quite rightly points out that Clara was mixing with some obviously nefarious characters. There's nothing wrong with Yohan's initial line of questioning; why Clara was indeed sleeping with several men, some of them undoubtedly dangerous, leads to the question why, and that's the question that would eventually lead to motive. Yohan's U-turn is strange, especially when the investigation was reaping rewards from his initial approach. But the film veers away from that line, instead focusing on Yohan's change of heart in approach following his conversation with Clara's friend, which forces the last third of the film into simply focusing on the aspect of equality, which although vital and unmistakably an important topic, swerves the film into territory that is less interesting in terms of the case. However, The Night of the 12th is mostly a very solid police procedural with decent and understated performances. And despite it's many flaws, it's an interesting addition to the canon. 7.0/10