To Catch a Killer
On New Year’s Eve, when a sniper kills 29 people in the city, Geoffrey Lammark, the chief investigator of the FBI (played by Ben Mendelsohn), tells the Baltimore Police Department that their suspect is not a type, he is a person. “Somebody loved him,” Lammark says. “Somebody trained him, and somebody sold him that gun.” Eleanor (Shailene Woodley), a young beat cop who was on the scene of the attack, hears this. Together, they try to understand how to navigate a system that is more interested in what people think about them than the safety of those people in Damián Szifron’s “To Catch a Killer.”
The thriller which Szifron co-wrote with Jonathan Wakeham wants to use the framework of a serial killer movie to point out our systems’ failures and take aim at politicians and police departments and jingoistic fascists and media and military-industrial complex and FBI and NRA and America’s lack of mental health care access but its ambitions exceed its capabilities. Stylish! But overwrought plotting and underdeveloped characters undermine visual ideas by Szifron & cinematographer Javier Juliá.
Woodley’s Eleanor is introduced in a way that is much like Angelia Jolie’s character in Phillip Noyce’s 1999 “The Bone Collector,” which was much better than this film. As she arrives at the scene of the shooting, an apartment nearby explodes. Her quick thinking causes her to tell the other beat cops to start taking down descriptions of everyone fleeing from the explosion in case the shooter is among them. It’s strange that the script doesn’t use this moment to say something about our current surveillance state.
Later, while investigating what remains of the bombed-out apartment, she helps the FBI think outside the box when it comes to where the perpetrator may have left his DNA. In doing so they fish some feces out of a toilet and find out he has an iron deficiency and could therefore be a vegetarian. This new perspective leads Lammark to reassign Eleanor as BPD’s liaison with the FBI. From there on out, the movie hits all of its expected investigative beats as Eleanor lends her brain to Lammark and his team including charismatic FBI Agent Jack Mackenzie (Jovan Adepo).
Unfortunately, certain moments, like a dinner discussion between Lammark and his husband Gavin (Michael Cram), devolve into trite didacticism. And besides being gay, Lammark feels like every hard as nails cop we’ve ever seen before. Mendelsohn tries to bring complexity to him but many of his flowery speeches come off as parodies of Mandy Patinkin’s poetic profiler Gideon during “Criminal Minds’” early seasons.
Eleanor is supposed to be a “modern day Clarice Starling,” but Woodley is just way out of her depth here. Scenes of her returning home alone to her cat (whose name we never learn) in their sparsely decorated apartment only for Woodley to take a bath or swimming alone in some large Olympic pool or walking the streets alone at night are all meant to convey her as a loner, but again mostly just play like parodies of this kind of character.
For about two thirds of its runtime I was still willing to give it the benefit of the doubt despite these characterization flaws, but when it’s revealed that the FBI rejected Eleanor because she failed her psyche eval yet Lammark thinks she’s the right person to catch this killer because of her tortured soul, the movie lost me completely. Eleanor is no Will Graham and Woodley is not up to task of bringing Hugh Dancy levels of layers to this character for three seasons of “Hannibal.”
And when Eleanor finally does come face to face with the killer, Woodley simply does not have the gravitas necessary to sell what should be emotional stakes for this scene. She also delivers maybe the worst line reading in history when pleading with him to seek medical care says “Medication. That shit works.”
Aside from its terrible dialogue, what is most disappointing about this film’s third act is how badly it botches its attempt at a sophisticated critique on many broken systems plaguing American society today. Ultimately, “To Catch a Killer” blames all of its gruesome violence on mental health and only ever scratches the surface on what system failed him.
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