"La Nuit du 12" has widely been compared to David Fincher's "Zodiac" and it is not difficult to see why. Both films detail investigations into murderous crimes that the audience knows from the outset were never solved. However, the two films draw distinctly different implications from this shared scenario.
"Zodiac" used its anti-catharsis as a launching point for a study of the unknowability of evil, and how its mystery can destroy even lives it does not directly touch. The murder at the heart of "La Nuit du 12" is unsolvable because it is all too comprehensible. The young woman who is burned alive while walking home from a party comes to seem the victim not so much of any one killer but of social patriarchy, or at least deeply intrenched misogyny.
I wouldn't call director/co-writer Dominik Moll's film feminist, for one thing all of the key characters are men, and rather macho ones at that. But this is definitely an anti-patriarchal work. The cop-characters, male inquirers into social "truth" seem unable to articulate a positive statement of fact other than that the order they uphold is not only unjust but also dysfunctional and ineffective. As they interview the victim's former partners they realize that any of them could be the killer simply because of the ways men relate to women, which comes to force the characters to confront the necessarily sexist paradigms through which they themselves try to comprehend the victim's behavior.
"There is something amiss between men and women" is the only conclusion the lead character can come to after a year long investigation, a realization that acknowledges a lack of comprehension as much as the attainment of any. The patriarchal mind cannot adequately contextualize even itself, much less its other. "It's a man's world," utters one of the few featured female characters and it seems a lament more than an observation as if she were asking "Why still? How much longer?"
The film's final scenes struck me as a shade too brightly optimistic for what is generally a very dark work. However even these scenes pay tribute to a secondary character who comes to seem the only one who makes a positively assertive act throughout the narrative: this character grows so sick of the film's patriarchal world that they refuse to be depicted within it any longer.
"Zodiac" used its anti-catharsis as a launching point for a study of the unknowability of evil, and how its mystery can destroy even lives it does not directly touch. The murder at the heart of "La Nuit du 12" is unsolvable because it is all too comprehensible. The young woman who is burned alive while walking home from a party comes to seem the victim not so much of any one killer but of social patriarchy, or at least deeply intrenched misogyny.
I wouldn't call director/co-writer Dominik Moll's film feminist, for one thing all of the key characters are men, and rather macho ones at that. But this is definitely an anti-patriarchal work. The cop-characters, male inquirers into social "truth" seem unable to articulate a positive statement of fact other than that the order they uphold is not only unjust but also dysfunctional and ineffective. As they interview the victim's former partners they realize that any of them could be the killer simply because of the ways men relate to women, which comes to force the characters to confront the necessarily sexist paradigms through which they themselves try to comprehend the victim's behavior.
"There is something amiss between men and women" is the only conclusion the lead character can come to after a year long investigation, a realization that acknowledges a lack of comprehension as much as the attainment of any. The patriarchal mind cannot adequately contextualize even itself, much less its other. "It's a man's world," utters one of the few featured female characters and it seems a lament more than an observation as if she were asking "Why still? How much longer?"
The film's final scenes struck me as a shade too brightly optimistic for what is generally a very dark work. However even these scenes pay tribute to a secondary character who comes to seem the only one who makes a positively assertive act throughout the narrative: this character grows so sick of the film's patriarchal world that they refuse to be depicted within it any longer.