Director: Damián Szifron (USA, Canada). Year of Release: 2023
Baltimore, New Year’s Eve. Everyone’s getting ready for the big celebrations. There are big parties, people are in open air Jacuzzis on the top floor of plush skyscrapers. It all looks positively nauseating. Then, just as the city fireworks go off, we hear the sound of gunshot. Partygoers are shot dead, one by one. A couple going upwards in a glass lift are picked off. As they fall to the ground, their blood smears the walls. When the shooting is over, 29 people are dead. They have little in common.
Just as the carnage is starting, a beat cop is dealing with a café owner who’s being a dick with one of his customers. Although she’s old and obviously has some mental distress, he wants her out. The cop looks on patiently, not wanting to get involved. Then her radio buzzes and she’s called to a disturbance on the other side of town. As she moves on, looking relieved, she tells the café owner to let the woman stay and just deal with it.
As the cop enters the scene of the crime, ballistics tell her that the bullets were shot from the house opposite on the 17th floor. Just as they look up to try to identify the flat, it blows up. The cop gets her colleagues to film the people rushing out of the house – one of them might be a killer. She then climbs the stairs to the flat, wheezing from what looks like a combination of smoke inhalation and a panic attack. She hasn’t been in the burning room for long before she faints.
We’re not long into the film and we already know quite a bit about Eleanor. She’s not one of those evil cops (known in the real world as “cops”) who enjoy helping shop owners harass their customers. She has presence of mind and can tell other people what to do, but is a loner. We never really see her interact with other people. And she obviously has a Troubled History. She is the sort of antihero who carries the woes of the world on her back but refuses to share.
Incidentally, regarding the presence of mind, Marya E Gates from RogerEbert.com remarks that: “Her quick wits lead her to get the other beat cops to start recording all the faces of those fleeing the destruction, lest the shooter is among them. That the script doesn’t use this moment to say anything about our current surveillance state remains a curious oversight.” This is no oversight. This is a film which distrusts the higher echelons but has no problem with cops randomly filming people.
The case is taken over by Lammark, an FBI man who barks orders. Lammark is a walking cliché. He is obviously supposed to have deep intuitive powers, and doesn’t play by the rules. As a result, he has a hostile relationship with his bosses, who nonetheless persist in putting him on cases like this. Following a gnomic comment that Eleanor makes about the killer “just shooting mosquitos”, he decides to make her his effective second-in-command, despite her inexperience.
Lammark, Eleanor, and Mack – a Black cop who comes and goes as the script needs him – try and track down the killer, barely resting as they called to confront some Serious Social Issues. In the course of the film we encounter a group of QAnon Nazis, some Black people concerned about police shootings, and someone who plays too many video games and watches ISIS films. Each case is set up as a distraction with no real depth. There is little curiosity about anybody’s motivation.
The film deals with institutional corruption similarly. Lammark’s job is made much more difficult because the men upstairs are more interested in their own personal glory. Once more, this is not dealt with in any real depth. The pantomime villains in suits are just set up so that we know who are the goodies and who the baddies. Conflict (and therefore dramatic tension) only really exists as something which happens off screen and cannot be really challenged.
One of the great strengths of Catch the Killer, though, is the performance of Shailene Woodley as Eleanor. Eleanor is not glamourous, doesn’t wear make up. She looks like a normal person. She is not one of those superheroes who acts on our behalf. She is a former addict whose self-image is at rock bottom, and has tried to kill herself more than once. We are asked to emphasize with her and all her vulnerabilities.
We learn that Eleanor failed to get into the FBI following a report which called her “aggressive, vindictive and antisocial.” But in the course of the film, we only really seeing her being the last of these. This is one of those films which expects us to believe that a character is aggressive and vindictive (or at least that the FBI thinks that she is) merely because the script told us so. Rather than showing us how the characters behave, we are expected to do most of the heavy lifting.
The film’s original title was Misanthrope, which is one of those nudge-nudge titles which tells us that there may be more than one misanthrope in the story. The killer, obviously, whose main motivation for random murder seems to be that he doesn’t like people much. Eleanor too. It is hinted that she understands him better than most as she’s just like him, even if this rarely comes out in how she actually behaves. And Lammark is also a lone wolf who distrusts authority.
A distillation of both the film’s strengths and its weaknesses comes shortly before the end, when Eleanor has tracked down the killer and is trying to get him to give himself up, promising that she’ll get him into a psychiatric institution and not a prison. “Medication”, she says. “That shit works”. These 4 words show both that this is not a film which sees incarceration as a problem for social problems, but also that it has a terribly trite world view. It swaps one superficial solution for another.
Catch the Killer is a superior version of its genre, but this is a genre which is not all that. It tries to be profound, without having much deep to say. It is certainly a well-meaning film, and we (or at least I) are prepared to give Eleanor a lot of slack, but it often lacks the incite to back up its ambition. The detectives often take leaps of faith, chasing certain suspects for little more reason than the detective must have brilliant insight. But we don’t see enough of this insight in any of their other behaviour.
It’s ok. It’s definitely ok. It’s just not much more than that.
CinePhil 