3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): To Catch a Killer

2023,  Damián Szifron (Wild Tales) -- Netflix

New Year's Eve. Baltimore. A sniper opens up from a skyscraper, targeting every party, apartment and crowd within his field of vision. At the end 29 people are dead. When the cops follow the angles back to apartment, it blows up. First on the scene is beat cop Eleanor (Shailene Woodley, Divergent), who makes a few instinctual choices, enough to get her acknowledged by FBI lead Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn, Secret Invasion) and asked to work with the task force.

From the beginning the investigation is fraught with politics. They want to blame terrorism, they want a quick find, and every agency head has their fingers in it. It doesn't help that Eleanor is damaged goods, with a history of mental health & addiction issues. But she believes it is this attribute that will allow her to see past the bullshit of the investigation and find the real killer.

A lot of people would fault this movie for Hannibal comparisons, and all its ilk, with "it takes a damaged person to find a damaged person". But I think it was more concerned with the banality of murder, wanting it to side-step the flashiness of most perpetrators in fiction. Every time there is a mass shooting in the US, the media presents us with a character, wide brush strokes of a person driven to extremes. But here, in the end, it was a mentally damaged man, failed by the system, with access to high-powered weaponry - not a terrorist, not connected to a hate-group, just a very damaged man. Whether the movie succeeds to relay this is debatable, as most would want a Hit With a Hammer point to be made, while I found the pacing and understated acting to be gratifying.