After the excellent “Only the Animals” or “Seules les betes” in the original, the French filmmaker of German origin Dominik Moll has another quality thriller. With the film “La nuit du 12” or “The Night of the 12th”, he presented himself in the accompanying program of the festival in Cannes, and as we learn immediately in the introduction of the film, the French police annually open about 800 investigations into murders, and some of them are never resolved. . Here we follow one such, and “La nuit du 12” could also be described as a French variation on the theme of the Zodiac, because the case of the brutal murder of a young woman will haunt the young inspector from Grenoble for years.
Someone will pour gasoline on her in the middle of the street in the middle of the night and set it on fire, and the young inspector Yohann (Bastien Bouillon) and his older colleague Marceau (Bouli Landers) can’t find a serious suspect. They keep running into dead ends, and the deeper they go into the case and find out who the murdered girl really was, the more they realize that there could be a lot of people with a motive. From the very beginning, when Yohann has the task of telling the parents of the murdered girl what happened, this film seems dark and realistic, and during the investigation they will realize that they completely do not understand the world of today’s youth. Especially Marceau, who is also in private chaos because his wife just left him, and it is a thriller that thoroughly and as accurately as possible tries to show the police procedures in such cases.
The inspectors will be most shocked by the knowledge that the murdered girl was quite promiscuous, that she nonchalantly jumped from relationship to relationship, with countless random encounters on the side, and many will think out loud that she actually got what she was looking for. Especially since practically all of those guys she was with are, to put it mildly, not very respectable members of the community, and most of them seem like an ideal choice for a suspect, but the problem is that there is no concrete evidence and they all have some alibis. This almost secret private life of the murdered woman seemed to blind the inspectors and lead them astray, and “La nuit du 12” was a striking and convincing thriller.