Léa Drucker in Smart French Police Procedural

In director Dominik Moll’s superb 2022 police thriller, The Night of the 12th, the focus was on French detectives pursuing a vicious killer who was forever out of reach. The closer they came to nabbing him, the more he got away, leaving them to turn in circles year after year during a long, existential quest that left none of them unscathed.

In that movie, the cops were flawed human beings and clearly chauvinistic (there was only one woman on the squad), but they were still the good guys. In Dossier 137, a piercing slow-burn examination of police brutality, the tables have turned and the cops have become the criminals, making us question the very notion of policing in a France racked by social unrest and class division. Made with the same laser-cut precision as his previous work, but with a greater emphasis on procedure than before, Moll’s new thriller puts the viewer in an uneasy place — between law and order, good cop and bad cop, protester and rioter — raising questions for which there are no easy answers.

If The Night of the 12th, which was adapted from the memorable book by Pauline Guéna, had hints of Zodiac and Memories of Murder in its catch-a-killer scenario, Dossier 137 feels closer to certain episodes of The Wire. Told from the point-of-view of Stéphanie (Léa Drucker), an officer serving in the IGPN — what the French call “la police de police,” what we call internal affairs — the film is loaded with procedural jargon and doesn’t skip a beat when depicting the many steps required to conduct a full-scale investigation within the department. At nearly two hours, the tension can dissipate at times, but Moll and regular co-writer Gilles Marchand turn what could have been dry material into a provocative account of law enforcement in contemporary France.

The two were inspired by real events that happened back in 2018, when the Yellow Vest protests lead to violent skirmishes on the streets of Paris and other major cities. Several protesters were injured, some of them critically by Flash-balls fired by riot police, or by cops sent out to quell demonstrations that were growing increasingly unwieldy. At one point, President Emmanuel Macron even ordered armored vehicles to roll down Paris’ boulevards.

Moll’s fictional account is set at that time, and it’s littered with interviews, cell phone footage and the occasional news broadcast. At the heart of its story is an incident in which a young protester, Guillaume Girard (Côme Peronnet), is severely wounded by Flash-ball fire near the Champs-Elysées. Stéphanie has been tasked with finding the culprit, leading her to conduct tons of interrogations, sometimes of the same people, and to gather all the visual evidence she can find.

Along with IGPN partners Benoît (Jonathan Turnbull) and Mathilde (Carole Delarue), she begins to piece together what happened while hitting several layers of resistance: Guillaume’s family, especially his outspoken mother Joëlle (Sandra Colombo), never trusted cops beforehand and certainly won’t trust them now, giving Stéphanie little to work with. Even more complicated are her dealings with riot police and members of the BRI (the French equivalent of SWAT), who fend off her nosy questions until she finally compiles enough evidence to concentrate on two suspects (Théo Costa-Marini and Théo Navarro Mussy), both of whom fired their Flash-ball guns at a fleeing Guillaume.  

As a filmmaker, Moll seems to function like a detective himself, painstakingly following his heroine’s every action, whether on the job or in selected scenes at home with her son (Solàn Machado Graner) and a stray cat (named Yoghurt!) she finds in a garage. The movie is not always suspenseful, though Moll does turn up the heat in the third act. But like any good investigation, Dossier 137 bombards us with tough questions: Is Stéphanie doing the right thing, or is she overstepping her boundaries at a time when France seems to be on the brink of class war? What purpose does it serve to police the police, especially members of the BRI — some of whom went into the Bataclan during the terrorist attacks? And didn’t the rioters provoke all of this by setting Paris aflame?

The film tackles these issues against a backdrop of deep division in which everyone seems to be either a cop or a cop hater. Caught in the middle, Stéphanie finds herself increasingly at odds with her fellow officers, culminating in a moving interrogation where the tables are turned and her own bias gets questioned by a superior. Earlier on her ex-husband (Stanislas Merhar), a cop himself, lambasts her for going after fellow officers, to which she replies that if she didn’t do it, “only assholes would be left.”

The excellent Drucker (Last Summer, Custody) gives another engaging performance as a woman trying to render justice in a country torn apart by politics and social grievances. The rest of the cast does solid work, especially Turnbull, offering comic relief as Stéphanie’s hardnosed partner. In one telling aside, the two pay a visit to the 5-star Prince de Galles hotel, some of whose windows overlook the scene of the crime. When Benoît learns that a room costs as much as his monthly salary, he steals a few bars of soap as revenge. Cops may hold some of the power in France, but they’re still struggling to get by.

The hotel sequence leads to one of the only pure moments of suspense in an otherwise chatty movie, during which Stéphanie follows a chambermaid (Guslagie Malanda from Saint Omer) home on the metro, hoping the woman may know more than she let on during her interrogation. Moll has always been a visual director, and he manages to keep us glued to our seats as the two play a subtle game of cat and mouse on public transportation, until Stéphanie finally corners her prey. The sad irony of that scene, and of Dossier 137 in general, is that both women really want to do the right thing — only they live in a world where it’s no longer about right or wrong, but about whose side you’re on.