LÉA DRUCKER IN CASE 137

Thankless truth or unnecessary obsession?

Veteran and busy French actress Léa Drucker (recently reviewed by me in Auction and Last Summer) here plays a tireless, dedicated Paris police internal affairs investigator who looks into the severe head injury suffered by a young "Yellow Vest" (Gilet Jaune) demonstrator which evidence shows was caused by police. It's a tough job: nobody seems to like or approve what she's doing, and in the end her results are inconclusive. This is a precise point-by-point film (as was Moll's The Night of the 12th but less successfully) that illustrates how outwardly thankless some absolutely necessary jobs can turn out to be.

It's part of the point that Stéphanie (Drucker's role) is herself sharply conflicted. The injured youth turns out to be from her small hometown, Saint-Dizier; and yet her close associates and her ex-husband are cops. Worse still, after she has done a tireless search for the police culprit in the injury, a superior suggests she was not even-handed and might be taken off the case or suspended. This is mad: she is conflicted, not biased. There's a difference.

The film gets lost in detail but in a good way. It's important that we learn specifics such as the fact that what Stéphanie works for is the IGPN, L'inspection générale de la police nationale. We need to know that this was a big demo, which was all over the news and centered on the high-profile Champs-Élysées part of Paris; that other branches of the service untrained for crowd control were called in for it and armed with flash ball guns (which are what clearly caused the severe injury) and that some fired them indiscriminately and without training in their use. And we need to meet the chief suspects and hear their slick denials.

Case 137 moves from in-office conducted police procedural to thriller when the investigation leads to a luxury hotel and a hotel room cleaner who works there, Alicia, played by Guslagie Malanda (best known for Alice Diop’s courtroom drama Saint Omer), who was cleaning a posh suite of the hotel when the demo assault occurred and who conveniently shot the key action with her phone. It turns out to be rather hard to get her footage from Alicia (and Stéphanie goes much too far to do so), only for it to turn out be, ultimately, inconclusive.

This is the point, and makes Case 137 a perfect sequel for Moll's Night of the 12th, which goes into great detail about an unsolved murder, a "cold case." An additional thread here is that police work is not only often thankless, but equally often unpopular. Stéphanie's young son reflects this when he reports more than once in domestic scene dialogues with his mom that he's learned people don't like cops. Stéphanie has to make a little speech to young Victor (Solàn Machado-Graner) about the necessity of there being law enforcement, no matter how negatively some may react to it.

This film may be itself, indeed, more necessary than The Night of the 12th, because we know all about unsolved murders and are entertained by murder stories but we know much less of the complexities of maintaining police discipline. Again the specific detail is admirable and parts of the investigation seem almost real-time. The detail is never anything but extremely well done. But, lacking the inherent excitement and color of the murder investigation, it tends to seem a bit dry and humorless at times. The precision is allowed to undercut the human element; would it have hurt for Moll to let his story breathe a little more?

Case 137/Dossier 137, 115 mins., premiered at Cannes May 2025 in Competition, showing at Edinburgh, Zurich, Hamburg, Jakarta, Leiden and Lyon. In the US Oct. 18, 2025 (San Diego International Film Festival) and Oct. 24, 2025 (AFI Fest) Metacritic rating: 73%. Aug 14, 2025 — the film was acquired by Film Movement for US release. Released theatrically in France Nov. 19, 2025: AlloCiné press rating 3.9 (78%), spectators 4.1 (82%).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.