Here is a fictionalised true crime drama, however one that’s extra stately and sedate than the garish procedural brutality of standard true crime. There may be one ugly crime-scene photograph, however in any other case this might actually have been primarily based on one thing by Ruth Rendell. It’s co-written and directed by its star Daniel Auteuil and the unique French title is Le Fil (The Thread), after an incriminating thread of fabric discovered on the corpse – or maybe it means the thread of logic behind a authorized argument, the free thread which, if pulled sufficiently, would possibly trigger the entire thing to break down.
The motion is predicated on a case recounted by Jean-Yves Moyart, a prison defence lawyer, who blogged underneath the identify “Maître Mô” and who died in 2021. Grégory Gadebois performs Nicolas Milik (“Ahmed” in Moyart’s weblog), a faithful, careworn husband to his alcoholic spouse Cécile and caring dad to 5 youngsters. When Milik is accused of murdering his spouse, with a neighborhood bar proprietor apparently an confederate, principled lawyer Maître Monier (Auteuil) takes the case; passionately satisfied of his shopper’s innocence however discovering himself in an more and more tense state of affairs.
An Abnormal Case is, principally, a quite low-key film whose incidental particulars of obsession and crime are oddly underplayed; the identical goes for Auteuil’s quite indifferent efficiency, gliding by way of scenes in courtroom and at house together with his associate and fellow lawyer Maître Annie Debret (Sidse Babett Knudsen). But the movie snaps into form after the decision within the closing act and a tense dialog between Monier and Milik has a drive that lends a retrospective cost to what has gone earlier than; their closing dialog raises the stakes but additional.
This isn’t precisely a drama of ambiguity, like Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall: it’s extra old style than that. Maybe Auteuil wanted to present it extra vitality on either side of the digicam, but there’s a cost in its deferred revelation.
