The Night of the 12th

There is a specific, bone-deep chill that settles in when you watch a movie that tells you the ending in the first thirty seconds. The Night of the 12th (2022) opens with a title card stating that of the thousands of crimes handled by the French police every year, some remain unsolved. This is one of them. By stripping away the "whodunit" tension of a traditional thriller, director Dominik Moll (who gave us the equally unsettling With a Friend Like Harry...) forces us to look at something much more uncomfortable than a hidden killer: the systemic, casual rot that allows violence against women to become a statistical inevitability.

I watched this on a Tuesday night while wearing a pair of incredibly itchy wool socks, and honestly, the physical discomfort of the wool perfectly matched the prickly, restless energy of the film. It’s a police procedural that hates the tropes of police procedurals, and it’s all the better for it.

The Futility of the Track

The story follows Yohan Vivès, played with a haunting, internalised intensity by Bastien Bouillon. Yohan has just been promoted to lead a CID unit in Grenoble. His first major case is the murder of Clara, a young woman doused in gasoline and set on fire while walking home from a party. It’s a horrific, senseless act. As Yohan and his veteran partner Marceau (Bouli Lanners) begin interviewing suspects, the film shifts from a hunt for a monster to a catalog of "average" men.

What makes this film feel so modern—and so vital to our current conversations about gender—is how it handles these suspects. Each man Yohan interviews is more loathsome than the last, not necessarily because they killed Clara, but because of how they speak about her. To them, her murder is almost a footnote to her "reputation." Police procedurals usually offer us the catharsis of handcuffs, but this film offers only the cold comfort of a bike track. Yohan spends his nights cycling in circles at a local velodrome, a perfect visual metaphor for an investigation that is burning energy but going absolutely nowhere.

Masculinity in the Rearview

While the film is technically a 2020s release, it feels like a spiritual successor to David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), trading the sprawling obsession of decades for the claustrophobic frustration of a few years in the French Alps. Bouli Lanners provides the film’s emotional breaking point; his character, Marceau, is a man falling apart because he still expects the world to make sense, while Yohan is the new breed of detective who is starting to realize that the "logic" of the system is broken.

The chemistry between the two is fantastic, but it’s the women in the periphery who leave the deepest marks. Anouk Grinberg, as the judge overseeing the case, delivers a monologue toward the end that serves as the film’s thesis. She notes that the police force is almost entirely men investigating crimes committed by men against women. The disconnect isn't just a flaw; it's the whole design. Moll doesn't preach, though. He lets the camera linger on the faces of the detectives as they realize they are part of the very machine that fails the victims.

The Beauty of a Cold Case

Technically, the film is gorgeous in a very muted, "European winter" sort of way. Patrick Ghiringhelli’s cinematography captures the mountains not as majestic peaks, but as walls closing in on the town. The score by Olivier Marguerit is sparse, letting the ambient sounds of the wind and the screeching of bike tires do the heavy lifting.

Interestingly, the film is based on a non-fiction book by Pauline Guéna, who spent a year embedded with the Versailles police. This explains the film's obsession with the mundane: the paperwork, the broken printers, the bad coffee, and the way a case can simply "die" not because people stop caring, but because the budget runs out or a new body drops.

It’s a "Contemporary Cinema" standout because it acknowledges "spoiler culture" by spoiling itself, then proves that the why and the how we react are infinitely more interesting than the who. It swept the Césars in France for a reason—it’s a movie that looks the #MeToo era in the eye and admits that "awareness" hasn't yet fixed the plumbing of the justice system.

If you’re looking for a neatly wrapped gift of a finale where the bad guy gets a snappy one-liner before being hauled away, stay far away from this one. But if you want a film that respects your intelligence enough to leave you with questions that linger long after the credits, The Night of the 12th is essential viewing. It’s a somber, beautifully acted reminder that some ghosts don't haunt houses—they haunt the files we eventually shove into a basement drawer.