‘Case 137’ review: Lea Drucker anchors Dominik Moll’s police corruption drama

Dir: Dominik Moll. France. 2025. 116mins

In Case 137, a French Inner Affairs officer investigates police misconduct through the 2018 yellow vests protests, solely to grasp that what she’s additionally making an attempt to uncover is whether or not her job makes any distinction in any respect. Lea Drucker provides a marvellous efficiency as a devoted public servant decided to seek out the cops who gravely injured an harmless 20-year-old man. Director Dominik Moll’s simple procedural generally succumbs to heavy-handedness, however Drucker’s efficiency provides the story with its essential emotional undercurrent.

A laudable consciousness of the racial, class and gender points at play

That is Moll’s first movie to display in Cannes Competitors since 2005’s Lemming. (His 2022 field workplace hit and Cesar-winning thriller The Night time Of The twelfth performed in Cannes Premiere.) Case 137 opens in France in November and the fabric’s examination of police brutality and institutional corruption is actually well timed.

The movie is about through the occasions of December 2018, when the yellow vests (gilets jaunes) protests led to violent clashes between the heavily-armed police and anti-tax demonstrators. Within the fictional Case 137 Stephanie (Drucker), a member of the IGPN (’the police’s police’), strikes to opens an inquiry into an assault on Guillaume (Come Peronnet), a younger man who attended the protests and was shot with a riot gun by police. She is looking for out who’s liable for what she believes was an unprovoked assault, which has led  to Guillaume struggling a fractured cranium and mind injury. 

Working with frequent writing accomplice Gilles Marchand, Moll incorporates precise photographs and movies taken through the protests into the story. That archival footage lends Case 137 an air of verisimilitude, as does the director’s stripped-down method to Stephanie’s investigation. Preferring unflashy digital camera setups, Moll provides the various scenes of Stephanie questioning policemen or witnesses a dry, crisp effectivity. Even when there are breaks within the case — for example, when she tracks down a timid maid, Alicia (Guslagie Malanda, Saint Omer), who might need seen what occurred to Guillaume — Case 137 eschews melodramatic theatrics.

As an alternative, the movie adopts its protagonist’s rigorous, relentless drive. Refreshingly, Stephanie’s stern devotion to her job is rarely totally defined within the trite methods of different police dramas. There are actually hints of why she went from being a police officer to investigating wrongdoing inside the drive — together with, maybe, an ex (Stanislas Merhar), a hard-nosed cop — however Moll by no means patronises his savvy heroine by suggesting she is making an attempt to fill some non secular void.

Slightly, Case 137 merely presents Stephanie as somebody who believes passionately in her job — even if it’s largely thankless. Certainly, Stephanie receives verbal abuse from each Guillaume’s anguished household, who’re indignant as a result of they really feel she isn’t working quick sufficient, and law enforcement officials who suppose she’s betraying them at a time when legislation enforcement is receiving intense criticism.

Intriguingly muted all through, Drucker hardly ever permits Stephanie a second of launch from the toll this investigation slowly takes on her character. Nonetheless, we see the pressure in Stephanie’s drained eyes – not that she would ever enable herself to make use of exhaustion or stress as an excuse. Drucker makes her character’s resilience and resourcefulness heroic, whilst Stephanie begins to understand the potential hopelessness of her quest to convey the offending policemen to justice. And if she does fail, will that invalidate the ceaseless power she places into proving that unhealthy cops gained’t get away with their crimes?

Case 137’s no-frills fashion can depart the movie feeling a tad generic, and one needs that Moll resisted underlining a few of his thematic factors so strenuously. However there’s a laudable consciousness of the racial, class and gender points at play on this story of a dogged middle-aged girl going into battle towards a closely male police drive. (Malanda is great within the small however pivotal function as a key eyewitness frightened to become involved.) Appropriately, Case 137 ends quietly, recognising that this is only one case of police wrongdoing amongst a whole bunch, the outcomes hardly ever leading to pleased endings.