Case 137 (2025)

Léa Drucker plays Stéphanie Bertrand as a woman who has trained herself to feel nothing on the job, and the whole film hinges on watching that training crack, slowly, one case file at a time. She’s an investigator with the IGPN, the branch of the French police that polices the police, and she’s landed the file on a young man badly hurt during a demonstration in Paris. Nobody will say who did it. Everyone remembers something slightly different, which is either a failure of memory or a triumph of self-preservation, and the film never quite settles which. Moll shoots the interrogation rooms like confession booths, all fluorescent light and eyes that won’t meet hers, and there’s a particular kind of exhaustion in watching Bertrand draw the same denial out of five different people, five different ways.

I went in braced for a lecture and got a character study dressed up as a procedural, which was a relief. The plot mechanics are the least interesting part of the film, if I’m honest, and my attention drifted whenever it paused to sketch chain-of-command detail nobody strictly needed. What keeps you watching is Drucker’s face working through the calculation in real time, weighing loyalty to the uniform against the plain fact of a young man left badly hurt. A late complication ties the case back to her own hometown, and it’s the one turn that felt built rather than found, though the film mostly earns its keep back by the end, so I’ll let it slide.

Moll isn’t chasing villains so much as watching a system turn ordinary people into instruments, and he trusts his cast to carry that without spelling it out in every scene, which these days counts as a small act of restraint. The middle stretch runs long, and a subplot involving a fellow investigator never quite justifies the time it’s given. Still, as a portrait of institutional rot working its way into one conscience, it’s sturdy and clear-eyed. It doesn’t shout. In my opinion, that restraint is exactly why it lingers.