Dominik Moll's Case 137 (Dossier 137) is set during the 2018 Yellow Vest (gilets jaunes) protests in Paris, but it could just as well be set in the present moment, as Paris has recently been flooded with similar grassroots street protests over education, cost of living, and fuel prices (or, if some savvy Hollywood producer wanted to Americanize it, it could easily be restaged during any one of the protests against ICE over the past 12 months). The protagonist, Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker), is an investigator with IGPN (Inspection générale de la police nationale), the French police department's internal affairs unit. She and her partner, Benoit Guérini (Jonathan Turnbull), are called in to investigate an incident in which a young protestor (Côme Péronnet) was shot in the head with a riot gun, leaving him hospitalized with severe cranial damage. The young man's mother (Mathilde Riu) and older sister (Sandra Colombo) were also present at the protests, but were separated from him and not present when he was shot.

Like Moll's most recent film, The Night of the 12th (La nuit du 12, 2022), much of Case 137 unfolds as a tight procedural: We follow Stéphanie and Benoit as they piece together the events of that night, tracking the movements of the victim amid the tumult of the late-night protests primarily via surveillance footage that they assemble like pieces of shattered glass—there is much freeze-framing, zooming, and trying to discern faces and clothing out of enlarged pixels—slowly but surely bringing the timeline and movements into focus. They zero in on a group of riot officers who were in the vicinity, but they are wearing helmets and baklavas, which render them anonymous—until they find a bit of bystander video in which one of them briefly lowers his mask. Each bit of evidence opens a new avenue of inquiry, but also new roadblocks. Against all odds, they manage to identify the group of officers, but of course when they bring them in for questioning, the officers flatly deny remembering an event in which any of them shot someone in the head. Obfuscate, deny, impede. But, then Stéphanie discovers that a maid (Guslagie Malanda) working in a hotel that overlooks the street where the incident took place may have witnessed it, but of course she is reluctant to offer what she knows because she is young and poor and black and therefore, tragically, fears police retaliation.

Woven throughout the procedural are dramatic threads involving Stéphanie's life at home, where she is raising a 13-year-old son named Victor (Solàn Machado-Graner) and dealing with her ex-husband, who is a police detective. We ascertain from various conversations that Stéphanie used to work with her ex-husband, but chose to go into internal affairs for the consistency of work hours, although that choice is now used against her, as her ex and his girlfriend (also a police officer) accuse her of betraying them by becoming one of the "them," the odious police who investigate their fellow officers. Stéphanie is nothing if not grounded and determined in her endeavors, but Léa Drucker, who was so good in Catherine Breillat's uneven potboiler Last Summer (L'été dernier, 2024), makes us feel how much each barb thrown at her hurts, even as she maintains a steady demeanor. Her job is one that is essential—investigating the crimes of those whose job it is to keep us safe—but it is thankless at best, despised at worst. Her persistence in rooting out the truth, no matter how damaging to the police, means that she is loathed by her fellow officers. At the same time, the glacial pace of such investigations and the brutal internal politics of police unions and the general power structure ensures that she will be blamed by the family, who demand justice, for not doing enough. No matter what she does, she cannot win, and in that hard truth lies much of the film's urgent, all too timely power.

The title—Case 137—suggests that there is something special, unique, dramatic about the case Stéphanie is investigating, but actually it is the opposite. "Case 137" is one of hundreds, thousands like it, where police exceed their powers and abuse the use of force they have at their disposal and then hide behind the intended nobility of their profession. Director Dominik Moll and his co-screenwriter Gilles Marchand (who have collaborated on six feature films) make no attempt to balance the scales: They are clearly on the side of the internal investigation and make it clear that the police officers involved were callous in their actions and lied to protect themselves, while the protestors were innocent of everything save making their voices heard. And when the investigation flips back on Stéphanie because she failed to reveal a tenuous family connection that might compromise her impartiality, we feel the sting of just how easily the rhetoric of the system can be twisted to justify any ends. All the surveillance video, all the eyewitness testimonies, all the physical evidence in the world may not be enough to bring about any kind of real justice if it threatens entrenched power, which is the reality in which Case 137 leaves us stranded at the end.

Copyright © 2026 James Kendrick

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