THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH: The Agony Of The Unsolved

Have you ever noticed that violent crimes tend to be both committed and investigated by men? So says a rookie female detective to her male superior late on in director Dominik Moll’s chilling crime drama The Night of the 12th, adapted by Moll and frequent collaborator Gilles Marchand from the non-fiction book 18.3 – Une année à la PJ (18.3 – A Year With the Crime Squad) by Pauline Guéna. Winner of six César Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, the film is unflinching in its depiction of sexual jealousy, the violent acts committed because of it, and the rampant misogyny at the root of it all. An easy comparison to make is Twin Peaks—another murder investigation involving a pretty blonde with a substantial number of secrets—but an even better one would be Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder and the way that film so aptly portrays the personal consequences of becoming obsessed with a crime that may be doomed to remain unsolved.

Men Who Hate Women

On the night of October 12, 2016, 21-year-old Clara Royer (Lula Cotton-Frapier) leaves the house of her best friend Nanie (Pauline Serieys) in Grenoble. As she walks home in the dark, she’s stopped by a strange figure who first douses her with gasoline and then tosses a lighter at her, burning her alive. When her corpse, burned to a crisp, is found the next morning, the case lands on the desk of newly promoted police investigator Yohan Vivès (Bastien Bouillon). The opening of The Night of the 12th posits that there is one case in the career of every investigator that remains unsolved, haunting them for the rest of their lives; for Yohan, that case is Clara’s.

Alongside his older, more outwardly emotional colleague Marceau (Bouli Lanniers), Yohan begins questioning everyone who knew Clara, leading him down a sordid path filled with sexual partners of varying degrees of unsavoriness — an aspiring rapper who wrote a song about burning Clara to death, a domestic abuser who boasts about their animalistic sexual encounters — any of whom could have killed Clara. As Yohan channels his frustrated energy into cycling around a velodrome in circles, like a hamster trapped on a wheel, Marceau starts seeing echoes of his own tangled romantic life in the investigation; his wife has asked for a divorce, and Marceau sees her lover in the face of nearly every suspect.

It’s never a question in their minds that the killer was a man; after all, men have burned women as punishment for witchcraft and other alleged discretions since time immemorial. Yet in their single-minded focus on Clara’s love life, the police — all of whom are men themselves — come dangerously close to losing sight of who Clara really was as a person. “She was no saint,” one of them remarks, as though sleeping around is a crime commensurate with burning someone alive. As Nanie says during one pivotal, emotional meeting with Yohan, women like Clara don’t have to do anything wrong in order to be subject to acts of violence: “Want to know why she was killed? I know, so I’ll tell you. Because she was a girl.”

When Death is Not the End

The Night of the 12th doesn’t dig too deeply into the lives of the police involved in the case, preferring to observe them and their behavior — which is often boorish and fraternity-like—at the precinct than at home. Nonetheless, Bouillon is easy to empathize with as Yohan; you’ll find yourself just as frustrated as he is in his inability to obtain some kind of justice for Clara. And Lanniers is a great foil for him as the hotheaded Marceau, whose inability to keep his own life and the case separate threatens to sabotage any and all progress the investigation has made.

Still, the film is not just about the men; the various women who cross their paths throughout the film are all excellent and play pivotal roles in challenging the men’s perspectives on the murder. As Clara’s case grows colder, a newly appointed judge (Anouk Grinberg) and a rookie detective (Mouna Soualem) bring new insights and motivations to solving it; that both are women is not a coincidence. “Something’s amiss between men and women,” Yohan says to the judge at one point, and indeed, that sentence almost perfectly summarizes the conflict at the heart of The Night of the 12th: Why do men seemingly feel so compelled to commit acts of violence against women? Can a group of men solve such crimes without the aid of a woman’s perspective?

In a world currently rife with true crime books, podcasts, and films that turn murders—especially those of women—into pieces of entertainment for mass consumption, these are important questions that deserve answers, and I’m glad this film raises them. In doing so, The Night of the 12th forces you to examine your own complicity in the way violent crimes and their victims are treated by society. Olivier Marguerit’s melodic, melancholic score adds to the haunting atmosphere, utilizing breathing and chanting to evoke the feeling that, as Nadia, the female detective, notes towards the end of the film, the dead are all around us.

Conclusion

The Night of the 12th emphasizes from the beginning that this is a story of an unsolved crime, so it’s no spoiler to note that the film’s ending remains open when the credits roll. And while the lack of resolution is as disappointing for the audience as it is for Yohan, that doesn’t make the film any less powerful.

The Night of the 12th opens at Quad Cinema in New York on May 19, 2023.

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