To Catch a Killer Review | A Baffling, Delayed Follow-up from a Promising Filmmaker

by Andrew Parker

A puzzling disappointment, the dour procedural thriller To Catch a Killer suffers from a staggeringly unbelievable plot, a poor choice of tone, and some unfortunate miscasting. It’s even more disappointing when one realizes that To Catch a Killer is Argentinian director and co-writer Damián Szifron’s first film in almost a decade, following his wildly inventive and Oscar nominated anthology film Wild Tales, one of the best films of the 2010s. It’s also his English language filmmaking debut, and it’s not a great project to make such a shift. Clunky dialogue, unrealistic leaps of logic, and an unnecessarily stuffy tone ultimately sink To Catch a Killer, which makes it somewhat unsurprising that a film with these stars and this particular director is getting quietly dumped into theatres with as little fanfare as possible.

A tremendously miscast Shailene Woodley stars as Eleanor Falco, a depressed Baltimore beat cop brought in to be a liaison between the FBI – headed up by Ben Mendelsohn, who’s doing the bare minimum here – in pursuit of a mad sniper who killed almost thirty people in various locations on New Years Eve. The FBI investigator sees great potential in the young cop because he thinks she understands the killer’s mindset.

To Catch a Killer is a massive head-scratcher from the jump, and not because it’s a hard film to follow. The opening rampage is stylishly shot and highly kinetic, suggesting that To Catch a Killer is going to be a slickly mounted down-and-dirty thriller. That momentum drops quickly, and the film quickly devolves into a moody, overwritten mess where cops endlessly debate the psychology behind mass murder with all the intelligence of teenagers and precisely no grasp on logic whatsoever. The dialogue is sometimes hilariously awful, and the tone is so resolutely serious that To Catch a Killer becomes unintentionally hilarious at points. This contrasts wildly to moments of sleazy, exploitation level action that feel trucked in from a completely different movie. If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be fun. Dumb and serious is a toxic mixture.

Despite looking great, there’s an overall immaturity to Szifron’s latest that makes it hard to take seriously, either as a serious psychological thriller or as mindless entertainment. The cinematography is good, but there’s little visual character (and not just because this was obviously shot mostly in Canada, and not Baltimore, as evidenced by a positively enormous Canada Post sign in one key scene). The characters are mostly one dimensional and thin, except for Mendelsohn who at least gets to have a loving husband and a professionally fraught backstory. Whenever To Catch a Killer tries to broach serious and timely topics like the talk radio echo chamber or racial profiling, the script from Szifron and Jonathan Wakeham is reductive to a fault, almost like it’s trying to stuff these elements in to sound smarter than the film actually is. People give plenty of speeches, but they might as well be reading from fortune cookies and self-help books. And as capable as she has proven to be as an actress, Woodley (who also produces) is completely out to sea here, never once carving out a believable space for her character. It’s a performance that reaches rock bottom during a moment that should be the most emotionally revealing point in the film has to employ some god awful tinkly piano music to try and wring anything out of the scene. It’s a movie that fails at nearly everything it tries to attempt.

To Catch a Killer is packed with amusing conveniences and contrivances, but it’s all handled with a self-seriousness that’s off putting. It’s jarring to see Szifron, who proved to be a great dark humorist with his last film, doing something so righteously self-serious. It almost never feels like the work of the same person, and more like the work of a film studies student still trying to work out the kinks of their latest assignment. It’s perpetual monotone grumbling and baffling pacing seems like the work of people who gave up caring about the project somewhere along the way. Here’s hoping all involved get the chance to move on from this sooner rather than later, especially in Szifron’s case.

To Catch a Killer opens in select theatres starting Friday, April 21, 2023.

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