To Catch a Killer

The Weight of the Cold

I’ve been mourning the mid-budget thriller for years now. The kind of adult procedural that used to fill multiplexes in the late 90s, all awful lighting, cigarette-stained institutions, and smart people arguing over evidence. Those films have mostly vanished. So when Damián Szifron, who gave us the ferocious *Wild Tales*, made his English-language debut with *To Catch a Killer*, I was ready to believe. For about twenty minutes, I did.



That opening is excellent. New Year’s Eve in Baltimore, fireworks overhead, everyone looking up, and then glass breaks. A sniper hidden somewhere high above uses the booming pyrotechnics to swallow the sound of each shot. People drop in apartments, elevators, hot tubs. What works is the arbitrariness of it. Javier Juliá’s camera doesn’t revel in blood so much as vulnerability. Suddenly the whole city feels exposed.

But then dawn comes, and the film has to decide what it wants to be. It settles into the expected rhythm of the hunt. Shailene Woodley plays Eleanor Falco, a beat cop pulled into the investigation by FBI veteran Geoffrey Lammark because he sees in her some useful fracture, something that might help her understand the shooter. Ben Mendelsohn, naturally, plays Lammark with the look of a man whose soul has been passed around several government desks.



Woodley is doing something interesting physically. Eleanor looks like she’s been living on fumes for years. Her shoulders never fully rise, and the way she rubs at her eyes suggests someone who doesn’t believe in actual sleep anymore. The movie tells us she failed the FBI psych eval because of addiction and suicidal ideation, and Szifron hammers that interior drowning pretty hard, literally filming her swimming alone upside down in the frame. It’s blunt symbolism, but it lands often enough.

Mendelsohn takes the opposite route. His exhaustion is institutional. Lammark looks like a man who could solve the case if everyone would just stop making him answer phones and satisfy politicians. I kept watching his face in meetings. Every time some superior starts talking optics, you can see his jaw locking down around the urge to say something career-ending.



The trouble is the screenplay won’t leave well enough alone. It doesn’t want to be a sharp manhunt. It wants to be an anatomy of the American collapse. Military overreach, mental health failures, media rot, gun culture, all of it gets dragged into the frame. Marya E. Gates had it exactly right at RogerEbert.com when she wrote that the film "aims to use the serial killer movie formula to critique our failing systems... however, its ambitions overwhelm its abilities." That’s the problem. By the end, the killer becomes less a person than a thesis-delivery mechanism.

I’m not sure the film works as a whole. The final confrontation asks for an emotional depth the script hasn’t quite earned. But I still found something admirable in its sheer grim sincerity. It wants desperately to be a real thriller in an age of synthetic ones. Even when it buckles under its own intentions, I’d take this cold, messy Baltimore over another weightless digital crime scene.