SK1

A woman is killed in Paris in 1991. A young investigator takes the file and notices that similar cases are being run separately. He spends eight years trying to connect murders across different districts. Over the same period the lawyer working the other side of the case ends up defending the man finally arrested. The subject is not the killer but an institution unable to join up its own records. The murders sit for years as separate files; DNA comparison is new and not widespread, and there is no sharing of information between districts. The tension comes from that delay rather than the perpetrator. The form is dry and procedural. Archive rooms, card files, the laboratory. There is almost no violence on screen; the events are conveyed through testimony and photographs. The source is real: the file was known by a code name inside the Paris police and the film takes its title from it. The man arrested became the subject of a case discussed in France for years. It is Frédéric Tellier's first feature and was prepared in consultation with the actual investigators. Raphaël Personnaz plays the investigator, Nathalie Baye the lawyer and Olivier Gourmet his superior. Who it is for: viewers who like procedural crime films and French true crime adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a fast narrative; the film covers eight years step by step and the pace is deliberately low.