Under its unassuming appearance as a police film, The Night of the 12th, this year’s top winner at the César Awards, is haunted by the mysterious presence of Evil itself.

There is nothing dustier than the premise of The Night of the 12th: the retirement of a veteran investigator from the province coincides with a horrible murder that happens in the vicinity of his precinct, which his successor has to handle. Said successor (Bastien Bouillon) is the film’s weakest link: young, unassuming, lacking in “temptations” (he lives alone and chases his demons by pedaling around on a velodrome), the new team leader is justice itself. He reproaches his unserious, joking colleagues for the sexist atmosphere which they’ve created; he stops them from acting brashly whenever they’re about the jump the gun. The fairness of this individual is irreproachable – and all the more implausible.

In the film’s very materialistic landscape, this walking idea comes across as a lapse. But, on the contrary, what is surprising in its mise-en-scene is how faithfully it molds itself on the shape of immediate reality: rarely does one see a film that is more rational than this, that so confidently refuses the supernatural aspect of narrations and the artifice of form. The film’s two main threads are treated in such a cerebral manner – one regarding the actual investigation, the other looking at the life of a law enforcement officer –, that the absence of any addition, of any supplemental meaning becomes a statement in itself. I suspected that director Dominik Moll might have had some lazy ideas: a film about policemen that puts its trust to an almost pathological – a professional defect? – degree into proof, evidence, into tangible objects, obtusely ignoring anything that might slip past the filter of intellect.

In other words, it’s not at all clear, during the first half of The Night of the 12th, if Moll’s score is outdated out of pure choice, or out of inertia. Although it might well be: the film’s first still explicitly informs the audience that what they’re about to see is an unsolved investigation. I kept on waiting to see where this message would lead: is it a trap? A false lead? Not in the slightest: The Night of the 12th seems to be the work of a creator that is not up to any pranks; a creator who is hellbent on taking us by storm with a film that doesn’t know how to fly.

Buoyed by Moll’s serious streak, the film takes on the status of a serious work of art and offers us exactly what it pretends to be: the cumbersome, prosaic nature of an investigation like so many others, which nobody can get to the bottom of. There is a terrible sort of violence at play here: that of a procedure that, no matter how meticulous and laborious, is ultimately incapable of making any justice for its victim. The film’s heartbreak lies in this self-evident powerlessness that ends up being more or less accepted by everyone that is involved in the process, including the stoutest and most ambitious of them, lies the film’s most heartbreaking.

Moll is more ingenious than he initially lets on: riding on the coattails of so many witty films about highly competent policemen, he is well aware that, in this context, the only possible twist is accepting that there can be no twist. An unsolved investigation must remain as such even amid fiction – and any sort of deus ex machina, any sort of fortunate coincidence would be a scandalous frivolity. It’s necessary to render cinema responsible towards all of the victims that have never received any justice in this world. Because within this state of resignation, there might well be a sort of retribution at play – an honesty that points out a justice system that is very far away from the efficiency that it claims to have.

The case that lands on the desks of these officers sounds like a message posted on social media: it enters by storm and, for a while, it’s the viral content that animates everybody in the precinct; the first results are immediate; things are seemingly moving in the right direction, then some prove to be dead ends, but new leads pop right up, etc.; and then, in time, the case seems to come to a standstill, new investigations come up along with erasure, and the lack of conclusions weighs down so heavily that the story ends up languishing at the bottom of a drawer, and in the minds of the most affected victims.

The Night of the 12th has the intelligence to say all of these things in an equal tone: we don’t even realize the precise moment when the investigators are beginning to slip and then give up, caught up in the problems of their romantic relationships, their weariness, or their lack of funding – and until we register all of it, three years have elapsed since the crime. There is a given realism in the film that initially comes across as naive and pedestrian but then turns into food for thought, especially because it’s blocking all safety exits – happy endings, intuitions, incredible revelations – that the “magic” of cinema has gotten us all too used to. In the end, the modesty of the project makes Moll not skip any of the investigation’s obligatory steps – it obligates us to witness more and more interrogations of people from within the victim’s group of peers – to the same degree that it gradually opens the larger trajectory of a film that ends up being devoured by the drama that it sets into motions.

After all, what is striking about this story is the amplitude that the film gains all of a sudden, by ending up going from a small police station in Grenoble to the very rotten core of it all: within mentalities that are globally widespread. But not even this critique of patriarchy – “men are both the killers and the judges”, as one female investigator puts it at one point – is the film’s final horizon. By shaking free from genre conventions, The Night of the 12th allows us to have a tête-à-tête conversation with this metaphysical evil that it conjures with minimal means, an evil that was unleashed onto the world and insinuated into the lives that are closest to us. Far from reaching for any gimmicks and dazzles, Moll plants an island of darkness within the very heart of his film.

„The Night of the 12th” will be released in Romanian cinemas on the 5th of May. 

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.