TO CATCH A KILLER - Mark Reviews Movies

To Catch a Killer, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 20, 2023

To Catch a Killer clearly wants to be more than a standard thriller/procedural. Its ambitions are fairly daring within the scope of a story that's essentially about some hard-working police officials searching for a mass murderer.

The screenplay by director Damián Szifron and Jonathan Wakeham looks into the darkness of modern American society—from its divisive political climate, to the more public rise of hateful groups and individuals, to the epidemic of mass shootings and proliferation of a gun culture that feeds and indirectly excuses such tragedies. These filmmakers ultimately take on a lot more than they can handle, but for a while, the real-world concerns and anxieties beneath this otherwise straightforward story make it fairly compelling.

We meet Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley), a beat cop in Baltimore, in the aftermath of a terrifying and horrific string of multiple murders as a new year arrives in the city. Under the noise cover of exploding fireworks, someone uses a sniper rifle to indiscriminately murder 29 people. The movie's opening sequence details that crime in such a way that we gradually understand exactly what is happening in the moment, only for the full extent of the horror to be revealed by way of lasers, tracing the trajectory of bullets from multiple crimes scenes to a single source. The course of whole sequence is striking, frightening, and haunting.

As for Eleanor, she is called in to one of those crime scenes, rushes to the apartment building where the shots came from, and ends up catching the attention of FBI agent Geoffrey Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn). He's sent by the agency to help local police with the investigation into the murders and the manhunt for the shooter, and after Eleanor makes a few keen observations about the probable profile of the suspect, Lammark enlists the low-ranked, personally troubled officer to serve as a liaison between his team and the local police department. Really, he thinks she might have some insight into the killer, because Eleanor has a similar way of thinking about herself and the world as their unknown suspect.

Obviously, the plotting is pretty much the stuff of routine. Lammark, his trusted right-hand man Mackenzie (Jovan Adepo), and Eleanor start looking for evidence, which is essentially non-existent because the murderer knows how to cover his tracks, and following the few leads they have based on some educated assumptions about such a killer.

The uncertainty within the investigation, though, is more the point than the investigation itself. Here, Lammark gets into arguments with local government about closing down certain highly populated venues and instituting a curfew, because the killer is still at a large and likely will strike again, but the mass murder and the likelihood of another mean little when it comes to things continuing on as they usually do. A montage of opinions on talk radio and TV news gives us a sense of how such crimes instantly become fodder for talking points but little to no action. When the killer does emerge again at a shopping mall, footage of the mass shooting (another unsettling sequence, thanks to intentionally disjointed editing and the use of the perspective of silent security cameras) becomes an excuse for some empty grandstanding by a news anchor and a rallying point for a far-right-wing organization.

Some of these developments come across a bit like a checklist of subjects that Szifron and Wakeham want to address (That last-mentioned scene, with the news anchor, is unconvincing, either as police procedure or within the purview of even the most ethically questionable brands of journalism). The fact that such an otherwise familiar story actually includes and, to some extent, seems to revolve around these larger subjects is admirable (The identity and psychology of the killer, as someone who was born into a life surrounded by firearms and whose reasons for killing stem from an act of gun violence, are too on-the-nose to be tossed aside as some coincidence of plotting).

The central characters and performances, too, are quite engaging. Woodley is quiet but resolved as the cop with a knack for understanding the mentality and circumstances of someone like this killer, because she has experienced—and still experiences—so much pain herself. Mendelsohn offers a lived-in sort of performance as the weary FBI agent, dedicated to his job but made cynical by years of watching politicking get in the way of protecting the public and catching criminals. If some of the thematic ambitions and formulaic plotting start to overwhelm the material, these two actors help to bring it back to earth and provide it with some degree of recognizable humanity.

There's a level of unexpected thoughtfulness and examination in this movie, which certainly elevates it above its roots as a typical crime thriller. The unavoidable issue, unfortunately, is when the movie's plot requirements become a wall for the consideration and concern for these larger societal subjects—such as the role and responsibility of the media in covering such crimes, the failures of law enforcement to stop or solve such acts because of personal ambitions or general incompetence, and the very existence of a gun culture in the United States and what that means on a legal and moral plane. To Catch a Killer becomes far too simplistic, both in the resolution of its plot and in its naïve belief that a certain four-letter word is the answer.

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