The Night of the 12th is a French police thriller about a shocking murder that becomes an obsession for the two detectives trying to solve it.
This is the second French "mean streets" cop movie to come out in as many months. Like Maigret, it starts out as a methodical investigation of a murder, but it soon becomes clear it has other things on its mind than one crime.
On the night of the 12th of October, two parties are held. One marks the retirement of an old police officer, as he hands over the reins of the murder squad to the younger Yohan.
At the same time, a group of young people are also celebrating. One of them, Clara, leaves early, and on the way home, she's violently murdered.
Yohan and his older partner Marceau are in charge of the case. And, like all police investigations, particularly in a French policier movie, that means talking to everyone the victim knew - family, friends, lovers…
And it transpires that there were quite a few lovers. Clara's friend Nanie confesses that Clara "fell in love very easily".
Quite how easily becomes clear, as Yohan and Marceau start to unearth a string of shallow, charmless, young and not-so-young men.
And as the investigation continues, Yohan starts to question why a murder like this - of a young attractive woman - invariably takes this line of questioning. Who did Clara sleep with? Did that make any ex-lovers jealous?
Who's on trial here, he wonders, and who's really being investigated?
The case starts to affect the two partners differently. The single Yohan lives alone and can cut himself off emotionally.
Marceau is married but on the verge of divorce. And his anger comes out in the investigation, possibly endangering the case. He finds it hard to control his fury at these worthless men, any one of whom, he's sure, could have killed Clara.
As the investigation struggles, they start to wonder what they're doing, building up this mountain of paperwork - reports, transcriptions of interviews, leads and dead ends - for what?
We're fighting evil with reports, complains Marceau.
When later a sharp, new female officer is brought onto the case, she points out the unpalatable fact that, in crimes like this, men are overwhelmingly the people most likely to commit them, and they're also the people generally investigating them.
Hanging over The Night of the 12th are more unpleasant but unavoidable statistics. At the start we're told that 20 percent of cases like this remain unsolved - that feels low to me. And even if an arrest is made, there's no guarantee of a conviction.
As Clara's friend Nanie loses faith that the case will ever be solved, she tells the police the reason Clara was killed is obvious.
She was killed because she was a woman — young, pretty, happy — someone whose very existence was enough to inflame someone to murder.
We're also told that for many people in the justice system - cops, lawyers, even judges - there's always one case that obsesses them forever, the one that got away.
When later - much later - a female judge decides the Clara case needs money thrown at it, it becomes clear that this case may never get solved - like an Agatha Christie novel with the last page torn out.
But The Night of the 12th - written and directed by Dominik Moll - was never really about who done it?
"Whodunit" implies that a wrong like that can be righted with just one convenient arrest.
But this isn't Poirot or even Maigret.
As detective Yohan says at one stage "Right now there's something wrong between men and women". And not just on one night.
