Dominik Moll’s most recent film was released in the UK in March 2023. I wish I had seen it in the cinema but now it is widely available on both Blu-ray and most major streamers. I enjoyed each of three of his earlier films. He often takes a distinctive approach to familiar genres, with new ideas about structure and characterisation. Only the Animals (France-Germany 2019) was intriguing as a mystery film and one of the actors from that film re-appears in The Night of the 12th. Bastien Bouillon was cast as a Gendarme in the remote Central Massif in France in the 2019 film and in this new film he is again a police officer, but this time he is the leader of a crime squad of a Brigade Criminelle in Grenoble, the major urban area of the French Alps – another interesting location to explore for the director. The narrative is based on one of the cases studied in a non-fiction book by Pauline Guéna, 18.3 – A Year With the Crime Squad (2021) in which she observed police work in Versailles. Moll and his co-writer Gilles Marchand decided to shift the location and I think that allowed them more opportunities to present the story visually on the big screen.
The choice of location immediately raises an issue for audiences outside of France – making sense of French regional differences and, more importantly, the distinctively French organisation and control of police work. It’s explained in the first few scenes but what underpins it is difficult for an Anglophone audience to follow. France has three different agencies concerned with civil and criminal legal investigations. There are two types of ‘National Police’, one of which is run locally and the other is organised in special units, based in Paris and other major urban areas. Outside the cities the Gendarmerie, a more recognisably military-type agency deal with a range of civil and criminal issues. The ‘OPJ’ (Officiers de la Police Judiciaire) is a group within the National Police that deals with serious crimes, including murder. The OPJ are in some ways similar to the CID or Serious Crime Squads in the UK. However, they are working in the context of an ‘inquisitorial judicial system’ in which a Procureur will charge a specific unit to investigate a crime like murder. Later La juge d’instruction may also oversee the progress of a case and the collection of evidence, witness statements etc. In this case, the Procureur has instructed the Grenoble OPJ crime team to investigate a violent death in a small village which would usually come under the jurisdiction of the Gendarmerie. The crime team has also just got a new team leader, Yohan, who originally joined the squad from Rouen but is known as a Breton to the team. I don’t know how much of an outsider that makes him in the Alps.
The case concerns a young woman of 21, Clara, walking home at 3 a.m. from a girl friend’s house when she is accosted by a hooded and masked figure who throws a flammable liquid over her and sets her ablaze with a cigarette lighter. She quickly dies with her skin and clothes on fire. When Yohan and his team begin to investigate they soon find several young men who have had sexual relations with Clara but who each have alibis for the night in question. Though they find a small number of clues, they don’t immediately find any incriminating evidence to suggest that any one of these potential suspects is the assailant. At the beginning of the narrative, an onscreen title suggests that around 20% of murders are unsolved, so if we don’t miss that text, we know that the narrative enigma might not be resolved. Instead we appear to be focusing on the work of the team and how they respond to the challenge.
Yohan as the new team leader finds aspects of his new role quite difficult to manage. He’s partnered himself with the team’s oldest and most experienced member Marceau (Bouli Lanners) and it’s soon apparent that this will be an uneasy partnership. Yohan is taciturn and Marceau is more of an open tough guy type. Yohan takes his job seriously and tries to accommodate the older man – literally when Marceau’s marriage appears to be failing. I think the feel of this police procedural is changed by having a character like Yohan at its centre. He first appears during the opening credits as a lone rider at the steeply raked outdoor velodrome under the lights. This is both his exercise and presumably his way of relieving the stresses of his work. Later Marceau will remark that he thinks of Yohan as being like a hamster running on a treadmill. Towards the end of the narrative we will see Yohan out on his bike on the mountain roads. The difficult relationship between the two men, especially in dealing with this case, eventually will come to a head but it isn’t directly what drives the story. Instead, the roles of a few female characters gradually become more important.
The OPJ team is all male and this is assumed to be a crime of violence against a young woman committed by a man – though we only see the perpetrator in the dark with all features obscured by similarly dark clothing. Any of the young men who are interviewed might have been the attacker but it is not until Yohan attempts further interrogation of the girl friend Nanie (Pauline Serieys) that we realise that his questioning, though seemingly based on statistical evidence from other similar cases, makes the assumption that Clara’s sexual history should the main starting point for the investigation. What’s interesting here is that sending an OPJ squad into a small remote village takes them into new territory. In this small community, everybody knows everyone else. There are relatively few outsiders. Yohan seems a pleasant but solitary young man, Marceau’s marriage is breaking up. Where are the women in the police headquarters in Grenoble to offer a different perspective on this kind of village life? If you follow the surge in crime fiction literature and TV/film over the last twenty years you will of course be surprised that there are no women in the OPJ team. After the enormous success and influence of the two female leads playing the Danish and Swedish investigators of The Killing and The Bridge, not to mention their British equivalents and Laure Berthaud leading her squad in Engrenages/Spiral (France 2006-20), we might be surprised at an all-male police squad. Actually I think most cop shows are ‘ahead’ of the game now, possibly overemphasising women leaders rather than allowing any ‘under-representation’. That seems generally a good thing to me but the male bias is still there and it becomes the focus of the failure of the team to find the killer, not that they haven’t worked hard and with commitment, but they lose the battle and Yohan feels it. In the last section we see the arrival of Nadia (Mouna Soualem) a bright young female recruit onto the squad and the case is reopened by La juge d’instruction (played by Anouk Grinberg). Nadia herself raises the question about the majority of violent crimes being carried out by men and the majority of them being investigated by men. She clearly has something to prove and something to offer.
The two women’s actions do re-invigorate the case and there are developments, but there will always be unsolved cases. The positive outcome is that Yohan’s team are likely to do better next time. Yohan himself is less stressed and he seems to respond positively to both women’s ideas. This is a relatively long film and the pacing is mostly quite measured. It worked for me and I think this is an intelligent insight into police procedure, quite different to the frenetic scenes in many films and TV procedurals. The film was in competition at Cannes and won six Césars, the top French awards in 2023, including Best Picture.
The Case for Global Film 
I watched this before Anatomy of a Fall. Although that film got under my skin more (largely because of more powerful performances), on the whole I liked La Nuit du 12 better and was more convinced by the narrative. I was more than prepared for the case being unsolved due to lack of police commitment because of their documented indifference to violence against women, and their own crimes on that front. Likewise prepared for Yohan’s profound frustration and near disillusionment with life, as it reminded me of the detective in The Pledge (Das Versprechen), Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s brilliant post-war crime thriller – a man who suffers a near-metaphysical crisis after promising but failing to find a serial child murderer. (The novel was a more complex version of his earlier screenplay for the 1958 film Es Geschah am Hellichten Tag – It Happened in Broad Daylight).
I’m a bit jaded after seeing far too many reports about extreme overt misogyny and corruption in the Met Police and watching too many very dark British crime dramas like Red Riding. So I expected the same with this police force too, especially as the murdered woman turned out to have had several casual sexual encounters with ‘bad boys’ – predictable, but I suppose dramatically justified to complicate the narrative. However, it was a refreshing change to see a team led by two men that seemed to have a genuine moral compass, willingness to challenge misogynistic assumptions in their team, and commitment to finding the perpetrator. I enjoyed their dynamic and was particularly taken by Bastien Bouillon’s subtle but increasingly powerful performance. I felt he carried the whole film in just his round, open, almost innocent face, even the hopeful possibility of solving more cases like this with him teaming up with the younger female police officers. I enjoyed how that was suggested symbolically by his final ride up the mountain (and generally loved the landscape shots). I can’t remember the female judge’s exact words towards the end but seem to remember her implying cases like Clara’s would more likely be solved when the police started to feel women matter, and that for me was the crux of the film.
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