This is a film about questions. It’s about the official business of asking them, the new ones that instantly supplant answered ones and the squashed ones that poison all chances of social equality. An answer that German-French director Dominik Moll is happy to supply, however, is in response to Inspector Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker) as she talks to her teenage son. “Why does everyone hate the police?,” she asks as he looks at her from bed, ashamed of her profession.
“Dossier 137” is a dramatization of a specific case of police brutality that took place in Paris in 2018, during what is known as the Yellow Vests protests. Although it takes some time to show its hand, by the end “ACAB” would work as its tagline — well, “MCAB” with its leading lady as the reason to change the word “all” to “most.”
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Stéphanie Bertrand works in Paris for the IGPN (L’inspection générale de la police nationale). As internal affairs, she — as an antagonistic rival says — “investigates colleagues rather than criminals.” This makes her about as popular as a water cannon at a paddling pool party. Nonetheless, the film sides with her. Her arc is to emerge as the good apple, the exception to the rule, even as her own integrity is called into question for daring to see humanity in those outside of her profession.
The film lifts its inciting event wholesale from a real event on December 1, 2018 in which the yellow vests — a grassroots collective from across the political spectrum — came out to protest a hike in fuel tax by then French President, Emmanuel Macron. That night saw riots, fires, mass injuries, and arrests. Moll uses mixed media to add texture to a story that would otherwise unfold exclusively in rooms full of folders, whiteboards and tables. Accounts of the night itself are told through the rectangular records of an iPhone with footage of the fictional characters mixed with real archival material.
This does not feel like a gimmick so much as a way of having direct access to characters that we would otherwise only see after they have been beaten down by state violence. To see them heading to protest — young, bright and optimistic — is Moll’s way of showing solidarity. Other sources of visual data are used to put us inside the digital spaces that Stéphanie inhabits. CCTV camera footage and Google Maps are tools that help her and her two IGPN colleagues to put together what happened at a specific incident.
We meet Stéphanie in 2019 as she is working a caseload arising from December 1. There’s a lot to get through as many of her colleagues used the charged atmosphere as an opportunity to vent their violent urges. “After 15 years clean, I snapped,” says one policeman who threw a rock at protestors. Unlike those who come later, he is honest and contrite. It’s a relatively simple business for Stéphanie to refer the case on to the prosecutor for judgement.
Next up is a distraught woman named Joëlle (Sandra Columbo) whose son Guillaume is in hospital with a fractured skull as the result of being shot in the head with a riot gun. She wants to know who did this to him. Joëlle hails from St. Dizier, the suburb where Stéphanie grew up and where her parents still live. This recognition unlocks a previously untapped personal motivation.
The great Léa Drucker (last seen in Cannes having an affair with a 17-year-old in Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer”) is — this year — proving that she can play restrained and responsible adults. In Laura Wandel’s Critic’s Week opener, “Adam’s Sake” she is a pediatric nurse dealing with a case of possible parental abuse. As Stéphanie, she convinces as a focused and intelligent professional with an easy charm that papers over the script’s disinterest in her inner life.
We are afforded access to her domestic spaces, bearing witness to loosely sketched relational dynamics with both her parents and her son. Despite a consuming job, she has time for everyone. There is a ludicrously charming scene featuring the rescue of a dirty kitten that Stéphanie washes clean in the sink guided by an online tutorial. The symbolism is obvious. She cares for the vulnerable. There are few edges to her character. Save for a final monologue that spells out a point-of-view already evident in her performance, she is poise itself, saying and doing exactly what is needed.
There is an edge allowed in one of a handful of stand-out scenes. While hunting for a video recording of Guillaume’s shooting, Stéphanie interviews a maid that she suspects is holding something back. Like many a maverick cop before her, the usually by-the-book, Stéphanie follows the maid — through the metro, on a dark path through a park — until she can have the conversation that she seeks. The maid, Alicia, is played by the great Guslagie Malanda, star of Alice Diop’s courtroom drama/cri du coeur on ambivalent motherhood “Saint Omer.” Her simmering screen presence, filled with raw mistrust reveals — by contrast — the thin atmosphere in the majority of the scenes.
The screenplay, by Moll and Gilles Marchand, prioritizes verbalizing the step-by-step realization of who shot Guillaume and leans on expositional dialogue to move things along. This makes sense in a line of work where exposition is the name of the game and there is a dogged thoroughness and a precision with terminology that suits the subject matter.
Still, the moments when Moll lets the images reveal as much as the dialogue are the ones that linger. The contrast between two slight female IGPN officers and one large brawny male officer makes menacingly real the power play underlying an interview. Indeed the relative smallness of the IGPN’s stature tees up one final question, asked of Stéphanie by someone brutally denied an answer: “You did your job very well, but what use is your job?”
Grade: B
“Dossier 137” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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