Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Shailene Woodley. Ben Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo, Ralph Ineson, Richard Zeman, Dusan Dukic, Jason Cavalier, Nick Walker, Darcy Laurie, Mark Camacho, Frank Schorpion, Marcello Bezina, Dawn Lambing, Martyne Musau, Michael Cram, Chip Chuipka, Heidi Foss, Michael Dozier, Mark Anthony Krupa, Rosemary Dunsmore, Lesley Pahl.
The thought is usually unsaid, the lips not wishing or willing to suggest or insist the terrible truth, that the lines between law and order are often blurred, clouded by the fact that the ones defending the thin blue line are as often or not just as capable of being the ones to whom mayhem and murder are just as appealing a prospect.
The truth is inside every detective or officer of the law there is a creature just as human as those who operate in the darkness, just as there is reason to why a person may stray into the area and realm of being considered a menace, a person to whom rules no longer apply; and whilst both may seem at odds with other, we have to, we must recognise that what makes a person choose to live in respectability or to live in ignominy is not just a set of circumstances, it is a choice wrestled with daily.
To catch a thief, you use a thief, To Catch A Killer…
…the choice perhaps is obvious, especially when the killer is one of product and accident and not through a set of malicious actions, just a compulsion driven by one moment in childhood.
It is to this that Damián Szifron and Jonathan Wakeham’s To Catch A Killer feels its way around a controversial issue, to use a person whose own psychological disturbances cloud her time in uniform, but to whom it does not personally impinge when it comes to decision making, when it comes to being able to confronting that which for others would leave them frozen and possibly a victim as well.
Whilst the film at times seems forced, even static, there is bursting out of it a tremendously eye-opening performance in the latter stages of the tale by Shailene Woodley in the role of talented but troubled officer Eleanor Falco, and this is highlighted by her scenes with Ralph Ineson in the role of Dean Possey.
The recognition of the pair’s mutual destruction, a meeting between minds, one under the social pressure of conformity and the other having lost the reason to be encumbered by convention is an almost perfect representation of the battle within each of us, those who stand in the light but fight the darkness in the heart, and those who have strayed into the realm of human nightfall but have glimmers of the person they once were.
To Catch A Killer is a respectable film, brimming with possibility, but sadly lacking in its overall delivery.
Ian D. Hall