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Geek Vibes Nation
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
‘Case 137 (Dossier 137)' Review - An Engaging, Razor-Sharp And Thought-Provoking Portrayal Of Police Repression
The French director Dominik Moll definitely has a love for gripping police stories. After creating the magnificent police thriller The Night of the 12th in 2022, in which police officers are trying to capture a ferocious killer, he's now once again returning to the world of police investigations, violence, and chauvinism. In Case 137 (original title: Dossier 137 ), the tables are turned, though, as this time, the cops are the criminals. Good becomes bad, and bad becomes even worse. The nearly two-hour-long movie, which is a slow-burning portrayal of police repression, brutality, and tension, becomes an immersive experience, during which you will start to question the integrity of the French police and if there's such a thing as a good cop anymore. While Case 137 certainly is a police drama, Moll doesn't overdo it with the dramatic element. Yes, the events happening in this feature are the dramatized version of the Yellow Vest protests in 2018, which led to violent conflicts, many injuries, and arrests in Paris and other major cities. Still, the movie itself isn't an over-the-top drama at all. That is because the filmmaker uses a much slower and organic approach in bringing the story to the big screen. The script by Moll and Gilles Marchand (Only The Animals) is almost a real-time depiction of Stéphanie Bertrand's (Léa Drucker) full-scale investigation. After working in narcotics for the last few years, she had to make the transition to IGPN, the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale, which is the French equivalent of the Internal Affairs Bureau. Despite being seen as a traitor or being disloyal to her heroic colleagues – especially after they were the first ones on the horrific scenes after the Bataclan attacks – this conscientious police officer doesn't shy away from any case, no matter how much pressure from the outside she's feeling. Léa Drucker as Stéphanie Bertrand and Jonathan Turnbull as Benoit Guérini in 'Case 137' courtesy of Top and Cour Pressure that she's definitely feeling when case 137 lands on her desk. At the heart of it is a violent incident in which a young protester, Guillaume Girard (Côme Peronnet), sustained almost fatal injuries after being hit with flash-balls fired by riot police. Just like during a real-life painstaking investigation, she has to collect CCTV footage from the scene of the attack, interrogate culprits, extract cell phone footage, and gather even more written and visual evidence. On top of that, there's a lot of bureaucratic paperwork, forensic verification, and sceptical news broadcasts she has to deal with. This mix of media gives much more structure and authenticity to the film and the investigation, especially when Stéphanie's evidence is combined with real archival footage. Steadily but slowly, Stéphanie and her IGPN partners Benoit Guérini (Jonathan Turnbull) and Camille Delarue (Mathilde Roehrich) build up the case. As the audience member, you go along with her during every phase of her investigation. You don't have information that Stéphanie doesn't have, and vice versa. Like any long-lasting, meticulously planned investigation, Case 137 evokes important questions. These questions are not only for Stéphanie herself but also for the audience. Should she help her colleagues keep France safe when it's struggling with internal riots instead of interrogating them? Is her job the reason why 'everyone hates the police'? When does passionately gathering evidence become stalking and cutting corners? Those are all questions that arise throughout this feature. On top of that, you also start to question whether Stéphanie is a good mother, especially when she comes home late to spend time with her son. Léa Drucker as Stéphanie Bertrand in 'Case 137' courtesy of Top and Cour Because of many questions and the male-dominated world that's riddled with corruption, sexism, and abuse, she has to be determined, unwavering, and unafraid to stand up for what she believes in, and those characteristics come true in Drucker's ( Up to the Guard , Close) engaging central acting. Her performance oozes the intelligence, headstrongness, and focus of a female officer trying to get justice in a divided and politically biased country. The rest of the supporting cast does an impeccable job as well, especially Turnbull ( Paris Memories ), who offers both the seriousness and the necessary humour, and Guslagie Malanda ( The Beast , Saint-Omer ), whose radiant screen presence as one of the witnesses fills the movie with raw emotions and humanity. What could have been a dry and boring exposition of a police investigation like any other is anything but that. While there are a few moments when the intensity of the story decreases a little bit, the movie ultimately becomes an engaging, razor-sharp, and thought-provoking portrayal of contemporary law enforcement in Paris. Case 137 (Dossier 137) held its World Premiere in the competition section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Director: Dominik Moll Screenwriters: Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand Rated: NR Runtime: 115m
France 24
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Arts24 in Cannes: The Red Carpet That Rules the World
We also bring you the premiere of the first French film in competition, 'Dossier 137' by Dominik Moll — a gripping drama inspired by a real-life police investigation, starring celebrated actress Léa Drucker. And as the war in Ukraine enters its third year, Cannes puts geopolitics in the spotlight. Jennifer Ben Brahim reports on how cinema is confronting conflict, with powerful documentaries and the latest film from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. Plus, catch all the red carpet highlights and celebrity moments from what's shaping up to be one of the most star-studded Cannes editions in years.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Case 137' Review: Dominik Moll's Riveting Police Procedural Places Good Cop and Bad Cop on Opposite Sides
'Why does everyone hate the police?' It's a fair and earnest question, lobbed halfway through 'Case 137' by 12-year-old Victor (Solan Machado Graner) at his mother Stéphanie (Léa Drucker) — who has a hard time coming up with a satisfactory answer, not least because she's in the police herself. 'It's not a likable job,' she eventually admits. 'Enforcing the law doesn't make you friends.' He doesn't know the half of it. Stéphanie is no standard cop, but an investigator in the French IGPN (internal affairs) department, making professional enemies left and right as she investigates various cases of police brutality and misconduct — while outside the force, she finds herself tarred by the same ACAB brush as those she's bringing to account. Not that Dominik Moll's clear-eyed, fuss-free and entirely gripping procedural drama asks viewers to shed any tears for her: Personal integrity ultimately counts for little in service of a crooked institution. After a few years off the French auteur A-list, Moll enjoyed a surge in acclaim (and swept last year's César Awards) with his 2023 film 'The Night of the 12th' — an ostensibly straightforward true-crime policier that revealed more intricately ambiguous moral layers as it unfolded. It was a more sober and stringent genre exercise than the playful Hitchcock homages with which he made his name in the early 2000s, and the change evidently agreed with him. 'Case 137,' premiering as Moll's first Cannes competition entry since 2005's 'Lemming,' ventures even more tautly into pure procedural territory, probing one fictional (but compositely fact-inspired) case involving corrupt Search and Investigation Brigade (or BRI) officers to the very bitter end, with little in the way of sensationalism or sentimentality, but a surprisingly pointed sidebar on cat videos. More from Variety São Paulo's Film Cash Rebate Delivers Early Wins, Sets Stage for 2025 Edition Brazil's Trailblazing Film-TV Org Spcine Turns 10 'Left-Handed Girl' Review: Sean Baker Collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou's Solo Debut Pulses Like Taipei After Dark The result should play at least as well with local and international audiences as 'The Night of the 12th' did, given the universal resonance and topicality of its skeptical stance regarding the police — and thanks in no small part to an anchoring performance of substantial complexity and bone-weary humanity by the reliably compelling Léa Drucker. Her character is introduced briskly questioning one officer accused of undue violence while performing crowd control at the populist yellow-vest protests that erupted throughout France in late 2018. He snapped after 15 years of clean and dutiful service, he admits, before begging Stéphanie not to strip him of his job. 'Policing is all I can do,' he pleads. The question of whether he really can do that hangs in the air. Either way, he's one of many such cases, with the IGPN overwhelmed by the steady influx of complaints stemming from the protests: Laurent Rouan's sharp, disciplined editing files multiple interviews and lines of inquiry into a combined, mounting sense of institutional crisis. If Stéphanie tends toward sympathy with her accused colleagues as she investigates them, her next assignment tests that impulse, as distraught mother and nursing auxiliary Joëlle (Sandra Colombo) claims her 20-year-old son Guillaume was shot in the head, wholly unprovoked, by unidentified BRI officers on a day trip to Paris, leaving him with life-changing injuries. The victim's family and friends are unconvinced that Stéphanie can do much to bring the perpetrators to justice — 'Like you'll believe my word against theirs,' mumbles pal and witness Remi (Valentin Campagne) — and Moll's cool overview of the systemic workings of 'the police's police' rather justifies their caginess. But the accusation nags at Stéphanie more than most that come across her desk, perhaps in part because she shares a hometown with the family, but more because the extreme evasiveness and defensiveness of the BRI brass she interviews in her preliminary investigation give her every reason to suspect very foul play. Working against her is the relatively high public regard for the BRI in the wake of their response to the 2015 Bataclan attack — even officers accused of vicious brutality get a round of hero's applause when brought out of custody — and an us-against-them approach to her department by seemingly all other police factions. Her ex-husband and his new girlfriend, both cops, treat her with disdain: 'Your half-assed enquiries smear the whole force,' fumes the latter. Damning video evidence of the officers' identity and their guilt eventually surfaces courtesy of a chance eyewitness ('Saint Omer' star Guslagie Malanda, in a brief, blistering turn) who's initially wary of coming forward — caustically pointing out to Stéphanie that many Black and Arab victims of police violence don't get as much due process as the white victim in this instance. Even with the video secured, however, the case is far from open-and-shut legally: The thin blue line gets awfully blurred as Stéphanie runs into infuriating technicalities and roadblocks from higher-ups. Drucker, initially a crisp, headstrong presence, turns increasingly brittle and recessive as the wheels of injustice turn, seemingly internalizing another, more ruthless question she gets asked in the course of her investigation: 'You do your job well, but what use is your job?' Humor and texture come via glimpses of her home life as a single mother, with Machado Graner (brother of 'Anatomy of a Fall' breakout Milo) excellent as the testy, vulnerable Victor, an early adolescent just beginning to see his parents and their profession through more jaded eyes. An adorable stray kitten introduces an unexpected note of cuteness, leading Stéphanie into the joys of online cat videos, though her father cautions against such distractions in life: 'When everyone's brainwashed and democracy's dead, you'll regret watching so many kitties.' Intelligent, drily seething and duly enraging in turn, 'Case 137' keeps its mind strictly on the job. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dossier 137 review – tense gilets-jaunes thriller divides cop's loyalties over police brutality
Dominik Moll's Dossier 137 is a serious, focused, if slightly programmatic movie about police brutality in France; there are docu-dramatic storytelling reflexes and a determined procedural tread. The movie takes its cue from the horrifying real-life cases of gilets-jaunes protesters in France's 2019 demonstrations who suffered near fatal injuries due to the police's trigger-happy use of the LBD gun: the lanceur de balle de défense or 'flash ball' gun which (deafeningly) fires vicious rubber bullets. Stéphanie, played by Léa Drucker, is a conscientious police officer in the IGPN, the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale, effectively the Internal Affairs bureau, investigating horrific head injuries suffered by a teen protester, which could only be caused by the cops' flash-ball weapons. She is divorced from a cop, Jérémy (Stanislas Merhar) who along with his new girlfriend – also in the police – is gloweringly resentful of what he sees as her bureau's disloyal undermining of the police, and the way she is questioning the corners they (supposedly) have to cut to keep France safe, especially after the Bataclan attacks. Stéphanie's life becomes even more complicated when she realises that the injured boy is from her provincial homevtown, Saint-Dizier – exactly the kind of place where people feel left behind by the Macron elite – and when she goes back there to visit her mum, she is in danger of running into the boy's own stricken mother (Sandra Colombo). The secret connection energises Stéphanie, she gets tougher and more persistent in her quest to find the guilty cop and put him away – but the awful truth is that now she is cutting her own corners and might get investigated herself. The film is on its most solid ground when it painstakingly – almost in the narrative equivalent of real time – takes us through the process of locating the cop culprits by finding CCTV footage from the site of the attack on the teenagers and then agonisingly slowly finding other videos from cameras nearby, tracking the culprits' route until the offending officers can be identified. This succession of coolly forensic images are juxtaposed with the kind of real smartphone demo footage that is now commonplace and which gets errant police officers prosecuted. Stéphanie and her colleagues are convinced that cameras like this might be found in a luxury hotel whose rear entrance faces the crime scene – and this is to bring her into contact with a possible eyewitness: a hotel room cleaner, Alicia, played by Guslagie Malaga (best known for Alice Diop's courtroom drama Saint Omer). Moll gives Stéphanie a rather stagey and melodramatic one-on-one scene with Alicia as she begs her to help, but Alicia says that putting her head over the parapet to criticise the cops will only get her into trouble – and if the injured teen wasn't white, Stéphanie and her colleagues wouldn't care anyway. It's a bit overwrought and redundant, especially as Alicia's evidence is in fact a smartphone video that can be simply made available to the police without Alicia needing to go on the record at all. In the end, the issue of Stéphanie's tribal conflicts of loyalty – between Paris and small town, between the cops and their liberal critics – doesn't lead anywhere very challenging, and this film is nowhere near as complex as, say, Moll's award-winning psychological drama Harry, He's Here to Help from 2000, a big Cannes success in its day, but it's high-minded, valuable work. Dossier 137 screened at the Cannes film festival.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Logging Trucks, Swimming Pools, and Bathtubs, Oh My! We Fact-Checked Our Favorite ‘Final Destination' Deaths
Few contemporary movies have left audiences with images quite as visceral as the one that opens 'Final Destination 2,' one that has been making drivers avoid logging trucks on the freeway since 2003. The franchise, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year ahead of the latest installment, this week's 'Final Destination Bloodlines,' is also responsible for such indelible scenes as 1. becoming a bag of bones during a gymnastics routine ('Final Destination 5'), 2. being liquefied by a swimming pool drain pump ('The Final Destination'), 3. and reinforcing all manner of phobias about planes ('Final Destination'), 4. suspension bridges ('Final Destination 5'), 5. and rollercoasters ('Final Destination 3'). 'Bloodlines' doesn't disappoint in this arena (though several of its most spectacular kills are bafflingly spoiled in its trailers), with a particularly gnarly scene involving an MRI machine. More from IndieWire 'Dossier 137' Review: Léa Drucker Carries an Ambling Police Procedural About Institutional Corruption 'Left-Handed Girl' Review: Sean Baker Edits and Co-Writes 'Tangerine' Producer Shih-Ching Tsou's Kaleidoscopic Solo Directing Debut The series banks on the premise that Death is a supernatural force coming for us all and we cannot mess with the order of it. But, said J.J. Makaro, stunt coordinator on the first, third, and fifth films, that doesn't mean that the creators and craftspeople behind the films ever wanted to disobey the hard-and-fast laws of physics. 'I was lucky to do the first one in the franchise, because we came up with what rules to make and the logic we would follow,' he told IndieWire during a recent interview. 'Everything had to happen properly in the physical world. Water couldn't defy gravity, or if a rope was to come loose, it had to do something that would actually happen physically. … We were grounded, physically, [in] how things should move.' That said, they weren't exactly doing physical calculations on set. 'It was all trial and error. We came up with all the different processes for a death to work, then tested them to see what would physically happen in each of these situations,' he said. 'There wasn't a lot of math involved. In retrospect, you can calculate it.' And that's exactly what we did. IndieWire spoke to Thomas Plunkett, PhD candidate in astrophysics at the University of Tasmania, Australia, who confirmed that, unfortunately for those aforementioned phobias, these are all plausible ways to die. We picked our favorite kills from each of the first five entries, along with added commentary from some of the crew who worked behind the scenes to ensure that these graphic deaths didn't actually kill anyone. The scene that has stuck with me after all these years is Tod's (Chad Donella) clothesline strangulation in the bathroom, perhaps because it's one of the franchise's more understated deaths, and one that could easily occur in the slippery location. 'It was all about trying to make it practical and believable. We weren't trying to make something spectacular out of the action. It [spoke] for itself,' Makaro said. 'The physics behind it is that, when you have an object that decelerates really quickly, like when Tod has slipped over and gets caught in the wire, rapidly coming to a stop, there's a big force being applied to his neck and vertebrae,' said Plunkett. 'Depending on how big that drop is and how quickly you come to a stop, you can sever the spinal cord.' One might posit that Tod should be able to stand up to reduce the force of the cord on his neck, however the tub is wet from a previous shower, not to mention the presence of soap and product residue, preventing his bare feet from gaining purchase. 'The way I would explain the wire going around the neck is that you have to conserve momentum,' Plunkett continued. 'Momentum is the mass of an object by its velocity, and there's something called angular momentum, which is a rotational version. When that wire is coming off and he has the end bit wrapping around, that's the wire trying to conserve its energy as it spins around.' There's also the question of the height of the clothesline. Unless you're really tall, most tend to be above head height. In 'Final Destination,' this is where camera angles play a part. Notice how Tod interacting with the clothesline is always shot from below, allowing it to be positioned at a height that would allow the stunt person to 'fall' onto it at neck height, as confirmed to IndieWire by Makaro. You didn't think we were going to do a physics breakdown of 'Final Destination' and not talk about the logging scene, did you? 'Whilst the logs would initially travel forward after falling from the truck as they are at that point moving at the same speed as the truck, they would slow down fairly quickly from friction with the road which I expect to be quite high due to the wood being very brittle on the surface,' said Plunkett. The police car being the first victim is likely because it's traveling at the same speed forward, while the logs have slowed down. 'This is a concept called 'relative motion', which makes it appear like the log is traveling backwards relative to the police car,' he added. Where reality and movie magic diverge, though, is in the nature of the car accidents, specifically the explosions. 'You need vaporized fuel and a bunch of oxygen, but when you're in a crash you probably sever your fuel lines and the fuel is still a liquid. It's more likely to catch on fire,' he said. There's also the matter of how long it takes everyone to stop. Granted, it's a wet road — owing to production designer Michael S. Bolton needing to soak down the tarmac to prevent skid marks, he told IndieWire — but it seems as though everyone's brakes are failing. 'For a dry road at a speed of 62 miles per hour, the average stopping distance — distance traveled from the time when noticing and applying breaks to coming to a stop — is 321.5 feet. However, when conditions are icy or wet, this can increase to greater than 393.7 feet,' said Plunkett. We could have focused on some of the more spectacular death scenes in 'Final Destination 3,' such as the roller coaster, the train crash, or even the tanning beds, but Erin's (Alexz Johnson) death by nail gun in the hardware store is 'simple, clean, very effective and very scary,' according to Makaro, who said they loaded up the scene with a lot of 'eye candy' that would swerve the viewer from picking who was really next on Death's list until the very last moment. There's a reason why construction workers wear hardhats and thick gloves and boots around nail guns: 'the typical human bone can withstand roughly 2,000 – 4,000 newtons of force before breaking. For a typical nail gun, we have a pressure of roughly 69,0000 newtons per square meter in the compressor. This can result in nails being projected at velocities of around 100 – 150 miles per second,' said Plunkett. The skull is much thinner than bones in other parts of the body, so it shouldn't take much force for the nail gun to puncture it. But could the nails travel through the back and front of Erin's skull and impale her hand, which she reflexively if futilely raises to protect her face? 'Nail guns [could] easily puncture through the skull and, depending on the exact pressure in the compressor, could travel through the brain and hand,' said Plunkett. There's also a reason why nail guns have two safety mechanisms in place, at the front where the nail comes out and at the trigger, where the user applies pressure. Both have to be engaged at the same time in order for the nail to come out. So how would Erin get shot with the nail gun if there was no pressure on the trigger? Makaro said there's a well-known, if dangerous practice on construction sites of workers securing down the trigger so that they can quickly and easily lay down a large number of nails. 'But that's a piece of exposition that gets in the way,' he said. 'We didn't justify the trigger being pulled on camera, we had justified it ourselves that it could happen.' I'm not going to mince words, unlike Hunt's (Nick Zano) insides, which become mincemeat when they are sucked out through his anus via a swimming pool drain pipe, splattering unsuspecting swimmers with his viscera, amongst other things: this has happened! 'Maybe not completely liquefying, but there have been documented cases of people having their intestines pulled out,' said Plunkett. 'The pump is sucking out the air and other things, so it's creating a region of low pressure, and then you've got the pool itself and the human body, which are two places of high pressure, they're going to flow to that area of low pressure. If there's enough of a pressure difference between the two, you can have intestines and other things sucked out.' Suspension bridges like Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver, which was used for this scene, work by utilizing a large number of wires, all connecting to a metal membrane that supports the weight of the bridge by distributing it across those same wires. 'When an engineer makes that kind of bridge, they're going to put redundancies in place, so if there are one or two that snap incidentally, the rest of the weight will be redistributed across the remaining wires and tension,' said Plunkett. The bridge's particular predicament in 'Final Destination 5' is, in many ways, a comedy of errors, with a lot of elements, all failing at once (thanks, Death!). Two elements that Plunkett pointed out as being physically questionable are Isaac (P.J. Byrne) falling fast from the bathroom at the back of the bus to press up against the front windshield while the vehicle was already in freefall (Plunkett deduced that they'd be traveling at roughly the same rate), and Olivia (Jacquline MacInnes Wood) being crushed by the car falling on her in the water (she'd already be dead by the impact of the 200-foot fall, according to Plunkett). Makaro countered that, because the water was in motion, it would cushion her fall, which Plunkett acknowledged, though he stands by his calculation. As we approach the sixth installment in one of modern horror's most enduring franchises, what tends to stays with audiences the most is that we're all just one wrong turn/misstep/unheeded warning away from Death's design coming for us. No, it might not be the goriest or the scariest, but it's that realism that makes 'Final Destination' stick with us. 'The very best thing about 'Final Destination' is having the director come to me and say, 'I want to do this and I want it to be believable,'' Makaro added. A Warner Bros. Pictures release, 'Final Destination Bloodlines' is in theaters Friday, May 16. Best of IndieWire The 19 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in May, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal' Martin Scorsese's Favorite Movies: 86 Films the Director Wants You to See Christopher Nolan's Favorite Movies: 44 Films the Director Wants You to See
