On Tuesday, delegates from France’s national film center held a press-conference in Cannes to share the good news: Moviegoing was on the rise, with admissions, local productions and theater openings all on the upswing throughout 2024. Two days later, one could still, ever so faintly, hear those exhibitors’ sighs of relief once Dominik Moll’s “Case 137” made its world premiere – because this slight police drama is of the exact type that will benefit from the relaxed expectations of ticket-buyers who hit the cinema once or twice a week, rather than a few times per year.
Modest in scale and ambition, this factually inspired, “just the facts, ma’am” drama finds an internal affairs officer investigating a case of police brutality, with both the film and its lead cop hitting the ground with an uncommon degree of tenacity. And give the title credit for honesty, as “Dossier 137” barely deviates from the work at hand, making for a sturdy procedural that wouldn’t feel out of place as a Very Austere Episode of “Loi & Ordre.”
The year is 2018, and the cop is internal affairs inspector Stéphanie (Léa Drucker, star of “Last Summer” and “Custody,” carrying the movie in fine, flinty form). A lifelong policewoman who seemingly only fraternizes with her kind on and off the clock — her ex-husband and his new flame also wear the blue — Stéphanie finds herself with the unenviable task of policing her own, and at a particularly volatile moment. As clashes between the so-called “forces of order” and the Yellow Vest protesters spill into the streets of Paris, hostility flares from both sides. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of smartphones and live-streams makes nearly every instance of violence impossible to deny.
Soon enough, she starts on a new case (guess which number), this one looking into a working-class protester who drove into Paris for a mix of sight-seeing and throat-clearing, and who left with irreversible brain damage once the plainclothesmen fired on him point-blank. Or did they? (They did.) But proving that takes time, and so too does finding the culprits and making them squeal — you know, the very act of building a case.
More so than most, director Dominik Moll takes particular interest in the minutia of bureaucratic police work, having recently mounted a similar probe with his Cesar-winner “The Night of the 12th.” Whereas Moll’s prior film focused on the mounting frustrations of two detectives unable to solve their case, our Stéphanie faces an entirely different kind of ire. Everything is monitored and surveilled on the streets of Europe’s most-visited city, giving the inspector a trove of security camera tapes, streetlamp footage and smartphone videos that together leaves little room for ambiguity. From a visual standpoint, the director bathes his film with antiseptic glow, reifying his wider theme by using an ultra-crisp digital lensing to leave no shadows on screen.
All which makes the (inevitable) departmental blowback an even more bitterly ironic outcome – but you knew that was coming. About as far from a whodunnit as this genre can get, “Case 137” instead mines greater surprises from the straightforward, relying on well-observed character turns from Stéphanie’s working-class partner (Jonathan Turnbull, of the true crime series “Sambre”), her investigation’s key witness (“Saint Omer” breakout Guslagie Malanda) and from her teenaged son (Solàn Machado-Graner, brother of the child actor from “Anatomy of a Fall”).
As in the best iterations of a genre that now dominates film, television and even podcasts, “Case 137” deploys a colorful supporting cast — with each of those bit players interrogating questions of race, class and public response — in order to shade the story’s margins with wider social concerns. A procedural is never just about the case, even as the inquiry barrels along. To his credit, Moll ably recognizes as much, making his procedural a fine example of the form. To this viewer’s disappointment, however, the filmmaker does all that and barely more — leaving “Case 137” both perfectly fine and entirely inessential.
“Dossier 137” will hit French theaters on Nov. 19.
