Tropic Sprockets / The Night of the 12th

By Ian Brockway

From Dominik Moll (Only the Animals), “The Night of the 12th” is a tense and laconic police procedural where there are no answers. Rich in atmosphere, subtle yet strange, a sense of the eerie is in abundance here and the film will produce anxiety. [Check Tropiccinema.com for showtimes and trailer.]

Marceau (Bouli Lanners) is a jaded cop who laments the passing of a pre-digital world. He is consumed with the loss of morality and still thinks of law enforcement as having the hand of justice. Marceau is in the middle of a divorce.

Yohan (Bastien Bouillon) is passive and young and prefers to execute matters in a detached and clinical manner. 

The two cops are called into investigate a grotesque murder of a young woman who was burned alive. The initial scenes showing the beautiful woman covered in flames make disturbing fare. We see a dark shape approach the ill-fated Clara with a lighter and it is disquieting. 

Marceau and Yohan are at a loss as to how to conduct the case as the leads are tenuous and flimsy. The consensus points to Clara being insecure and promiscuous. Each interview of Clara’s boyfriends only yields cloudy half-truths. 

Only one man, the violent and aloof Vincent (Pierre Lottin) seems a definite suspect. But he becomes as impassive as granite and is uncommunicative. The frustrated Marceau becomes enraged and is taken off the case due to assault.

Yohan is left, for the most part, to fend for himself.

This film excels in conjuring an oddly distant tone. All of France feels oppressed and covered in darkness. Orange leaves drift back and forth reminiscent of John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978). There is something of David Lynch here too: Clara, the dazzling bright victim with strawberry blonde hair recalls Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks. The sight of Clara running and submerged in dancing flames directly echoes Lynch’s students running in terror. 

With an unsolved case, Clara is fated to be a ghost on YouTube and smartphone video. Clara is famous in death, trapped in a rectangular image either in video or a living-room photograph.

Evil has the upper hand here, it is a living fog, a vibration, a formless miasma that invades the heart and mind. Young people clutch their phones and begin to dream and obsess over the doomed image of Clara. Grenoble is gray-green with the melancholy of this murder.

A pair of huge forbidding mountains appear the only witness to this crime. Massive and impenetrable, they create permanent blockades, but are the mountains locking the evil out or enclosing it within?

Write Ian at [email protected]

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