The Night of the 12th

Dominik Moll’s compelling procedural is closer in tone to the Hughes brothers’ From Hell or David Fincher’s Zodiac, albeit without the celebrity of those cases.

[Night] assumes the perspective of the police without exempting them from its damning canvas; their cool investigative professionalism (and, in a sense, the film’s) registers as its own kind of complicity in a wretched, man’s-world status quo.

Somewhere beneath its enthralling depiction of obsessive police work is a cry from the heart against a broken system.

What begins as a standard, fact-based drama morphs into a provocative look into how preconceived notions about gender roles can trip up an investigation, particularly when it’s just a pack of men on the case.

What emerges from this particular case is an expansive study in collective misogyny.

There's more going on here than meets the eye.

Treating the subject with the gravity that it deserves, it is an unsparing yet un-exploitative look at the rotten fabric of our society.

[The Night of the 12th] is a procedural that stays true to the original events by upturning the conventions of the genre. And the result is a gnarly, gloomy drama which exerts a tight grip from start to finish.

Not stylish, flattering, nor particularly visually engaging, but what it has in its favour is veracity; something that is lacking from so many police procedurals that indulge in the fantasy that crime is always solved, and bad people suffer consequences.

The Night of the 12th centers the case, but it's mostly about the consequences of unchecked misogyny. It's also about the life of a detective, in which romance and optimism don't stand much of a chance...