Out of the shadows comes a hooded figure, who walks up to her and throws a clear liquid in her face. On the night of October 12, 2016, she’s at her best friend’s house, where we can see that there’s a sleepover party atmosphere, but she decides to walk home by herself at 3:00 a.m. The victim, Clara (Lulu Cotton-Frapier), is a 21-year-old vocational-school student who lives with her parents in a province of Grenoble. It begins with a murder that’s a gruesomely scary spectacle to behold.

“The Night of the 12th” is a mostly compelling sit, though what lends the film its singular texture is that it keeps tricking us into thinking it’s a more conventional thriller than it is. Crime in real life doesn’t necessarily happen so neatly. Each time we think we’re seeing a classic suspense arc, it unravels into a dead end, and we think to ourselves: Of course. Based on a true-crime book by Pauline Guéna, the movie turns into one of the most casually authentic of investigative murder mysteries. David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” with its tantalizing ambiguities, might stand as an exception to the form - a singular winding creep-out, without the closure we’re thirsting for - yet even there you feel, by the end, that you’ve glimpsed the face of evil.īut “ The Night of the 12th,” the French thriller that was nominated for 10 César Awards and won six of them, including best picture (it opens here on May 19), throws the audience a slow-motion curveball that’s intended to tinker with our dreams. We will know who the killer is, and in knowing that a kind of order will have been restored.

Watching a police-procedural homicide drama, whether it’s the grungiest of VOD potboilers or the most visionary film of the genre, Michael Mann’s silvery, dread-drenched “Manhunter,” we more or less know one thing: At the end of two hours, the grisly mystery we’ve been dunked in will have its catharsis and its resolution.

Dread Night by Ryan Attard