Movie Review: TO CATCH A KILLER

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: April 21st, 2023 / 01:19 AM

TO CATCH A KILLER | ©2023 Vertical Entertainment

Rating: R
Stars: Shailene Woodley, Ben Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo, Ralph Ineson, Michael Cram, Rosemary Dunsmore
Writers: Damian Szifron & Jonathan Wakeham
Director: Damian Szifron
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment
Release Date: April 21, 2023

TO CATCH A KILLER is a thriller that focuses steadily and pleasingly on procedure. We actually feel like we’re learning something, even as the story goes through some inevitable turns.

On New Year’s Eve in Baltimore, people are out celebrating. There are fireworks – and gunshots mixed in with the fireworks as a very accurate mass shooter targets and kills twenty-nine people.

All police are called in to the area where the shootings are happening. Officer Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley) is sent to the home of a teen victim to help his family. Eleanor demonstrates immediate presence of mind by turning off all the lights in case the shooter tries this place again.

No sooner do the police triangulate where the shots have been coming from – a seventeenth-story apartment – than the unit explodes. Eleanor uses her phone to video people running from the building, in case one of them is the shooter.

This footage provides no leads, but it impresses FBI task force leader Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn) sufficiently to invite Eleanor to be the liaison between the Bureau and the police department on the case.

Lammark is prickly, prone to snapping, and much more worried about Bureau internal politics than about the possibility of dying on the job. For her part, Eleanor struggles with severe depression and a past that interferes with her professional ambitions.

TO CATCH A KILLER is a relatively rare film in the genre where an investigator’s touted insight into how the suspect thinks actually translates into something concrete. Eleanor has a lot of human empathy, but it turns out she also really does understand why this specific mass murderer is doing this.

The eventual confrontation between investigator and killer likewise is not common. To say what’s different about it would spoil it, apart to note that it works; it’s not the usual mix of bluster and defensiveness that we see so often.

The screenplay by director Damian Szifron & co-writer Jonathan Wakeham revels in its details, from paperwork discrepancies to tracing the history of pre-online database items. Some of it is eye-opening; all of it feels real.

Szifron knows how to get tension from a sequence. Once the gunman’s expertise has been established, we know that almost every situation has the potential for sudden catastrophe.

The director also has a gift for imagery. Shots of law enforcement personnel clambering through a mountain range of plastic garbage against a snowy backdrop is liable to linger in the viewer’s mind.

There are a couple of missteps. When Eleanor talks about wasting time, it’s more like a speech that Lammark would give, and there are times when we wonder where the paramedics are. Overall, though, we’re persuaded that the filmmakers know whereof they speak.

Mendelsohn is excellent as Lammark, driven, weary, yet capable of cheerful political debate with his spouse. Woodley perfectly inhabits the watchful, pained Eleanor. Jovan Adepo has charm and steadying power as another agent on Lammark’s team. Others in the cast making major contributions include Ralph Ineson, Michael Cram, and Rosemary Dunsmore.

Sensitive viewers should note that there are scenes in a slaughterhouse, although there are no shots on the kill floor.

In this instance, it’s praise to say that TO CATCH A KILLER ultimately seems less like a mystery movie and more like a miniseries that would like us to think about its observations.

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