New Indians had been one of the best feature films of winter 2015: between civilization and barbarism, the line is fine and this sketch film had shown us well. Argentine director Damián Szifrón returns to the front of the stage with his American command film, Misanthropist (or his horrible English title: To Catch a Killer). Almost 10 years later, does he manage to transform the test?
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Sniper!
New Year's Eve. Baltimore. The sky is already blowing out the sparkles of fireworks, launched by early partyers. At each building its atmosphere. Delayers still stuck in the elevator at rooftop inflamed, passing through family apartments and penthouses the most exuberant, all agree to enthrone the count of the last seconds of the year. Five... four... three... two... one... Except that in the midst of the festive hordes lies a solitary, sharp-bezeled killer: 29 times, he will titillate the trigger of his sniper. 29 times he'll fly.
Present at the scene, young investigator Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley, also a producer) is soon propelled in this case. Flaring in her a cop to the height, the head of the case at the FBI Geoffrey Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn) appoints her liaison officer. They start together in the darkest and most deadly business of their careers.
Background film
Szifrón's clothing leaves us in the background (or squarely out-of-the-field) of his feature film the constant erosion of our liberal societies. Totalitarianism of advertising that drowns its characters in surrealistic decors, skillful fake product placements, absurdities of all kinds (like recycling bins finally all poured into a huge open dump), horrific political wars within federal institutions... The investigation, unordinary but treated in a classical way, cooked his spectator in this constant but discreet juice, passed smoothly as a subliminal message susurred in his ear.
Thus, if empathy for this couple of investigators formed by Lammark and Falco is near-immediate, and allows to build a story mounted with hallucinating peaks of tension, in parallel born in the spectator a disorder. The more the minutes pass, the more tangible the killer's demands – exhibited in the last third of the film – appear. Worse, despite the horror of his actions, he appears as one of the few people supposedly portrayed in the feature film, refusing capitalist brutting, fleeing consumerist hordes, protecting himself from the fury of cities.
Quality misanthropy
In short, Szifrón builds a classic thriller in its form, extremely well photographed and with one of the most successful antagonists in recent years. We can regret a narrative arc started with Falco's character, useless and almost caricatural, but that he will unfortunately not develop. If not, let us keep it largely in the legacy of Seven and that it is without a doubt the best thriller seen in cinema for a long time.
Subtil, sometimes icy, highly immersive, Misanthropist (with an o barré on the posters because still, the good thrillers must be Scandinavian) makes you want to discover the first two Argentine films of the director, before (re)discovering New Indians. To watch (again for a while) at the cinema.
Intriguing!
[...] its classic urban polar look, Misanthrøpe of the Argentinian Damián Szifron paints the stained glass portrait of America [...]
[...] gross – even if it never rises to the level of the good thrillers of the year, Misanthropist in the head – and the millimetred montage does its effect, especially during a [...]