Misanthrope: the winning return of Damian Szifron (review)
Shailene Woodley and Ben Mendelsohn track down a crazed killer who is terrorizing Baltimore. A brilliant, exciting thriller, tinged with humanism and social criticism, by the gifted author of The New Savages.
Released last April in cinemas, Misanthrope deeply marked Firstto the point of finishing the year in good place in our top cinema 2023. Here is our review, on the occasion of its broadcast on Canal +, at 9:09 p.m.
We would not have received this film in the same way if we had discovered it at the end of the 90s. At the time, these kinds of cold, violent thrillers, these portraits of crazy serial killers and those (a also little disturbed) who track them, swarmed on the (big) screens. It was the height of the messy derivatives of Silence of the Lambs or Seven. Today, the American thriller has mutated and is mainly told in mini-series, and is mainly consumed via streaming. Double Prisoners /Sicario by Denis Villeneuve is already a distant memory, David Fincher now works full time for Netflix… Sitting in a dark room to watch a film like Misanthrope, in 2023, is therefore a rare, precious pleasure. Pleasure increased tenfold by the obvious jubilation of the guy behind the camera, Damian Szifron, himself back in business after a long absence (the sketch film The New Savageswhich put it on the map, dates back to 2014).
It starts very strong. The Argentinian opens his film on a rowdy and over-exciting note. One New Year’s Eve, while the wealthy of Baltimore are popping champagne on the city’s rooftops, an invisible sniper begins shooting people at random. Szifron immediately imposes a thrilling suspense ” geometric “, playing on perspectives, lines of flight, rotations in the axis, urban architecture, the sensation of vertigo. In a handful of minutes without dialogue, punctuated only by the noises of the party, the impact of bullets and the panicked cries of people, an entire universe is crisscrossed. Urban solitude, the different social strata, a diffuse existential distress… Everything is formulated by a staging that is both demiurgic and playful, which intends, in its graphic fluidity, to order the chaos of the world. The French title of the film, a tad more sophisticated and less programmatic than the original (To Catch A Killer), immediately introduces a hint of societal reflection, the beginning of a discourse on the America of mass killers, while affirming that we are facing a true arthouse film, the new opus of a moralist who examines the savagery bubbling beneath the civilized surface of civilization.
The investigation to catch the “ mass murderer », studded with tense, formally brilliant sequences, will also be the cross-portrait of two cops: Shailene Woodley, as a novice policewoman, and Ben Mendelsohn, a polished FBI super agent. The old guy and the “ rookie » are hackneyed archetypes, but Szifron subverts the clichés thanks to a subtly knitted scenario: the film first pretends to be interested in her, the young cop with dark thoughts, burdened by her past, before letting the story be contaminated by him, the inflexible bulldozer in permanent war against his hierarchy, played by an imperial Mendelsohn, returned from his histrionics of recent years. But the idea of intertwining these two portraits as we would observe two sides of the same coin, as Fincher intertwined those of inspectors Somerset and Mills in Seven, in reality only works half.
It is undoubtedly missing Misanthrope THE scene, the equivalent of the moment when Clarice Starling recounts her childish terrors to Hannibal Lecter in Thesilenceofthelambs, so that the film deploys the emotional power that it is clearly looking for, and rises above the box of the very good Saturday evening thriller. What remains is the pure pleasure, therefore, and Damian Szifron’s talent for telling a world, ours, desperate and brutal, sometimes in a single shot. Like the one where Shailene Woodley, lost in her thoughts, walks at night in the deserted town, lit only by the vulgar lights of the empty clothing stores, without a living soul.
By Damian Szifron. With Shailene Woodley, Ben Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo… Duration 1h59. Released April 26, 2023.
