Stillwater

Tom McCarthy, who won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for Spotlight, did not write this alone. He built the French half with Noé Debré and Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard’s long standing collaborator, who has César wins for A Prophet and Rust and Bone. The shape of the film follows from that split. Its middle stretch puts the investigation aside for a domestic life assembled in Marseille, with Bill becoming a father figure to the young daughter of Virginie, who rents him a room. Anyone who came for a crime thriller waits a long while. Filming was on location in Oklahoma and Marseille. It screened out of competition at Cannes in 2021. The pandemic moved its release from November 2020 to July 2021. Against a 20 million dollar budget it took 19.8 million worldwide. It was the first DreamWorks Pictures title released through Focus Features. The BBFC lists brief moderate violence, scenes of threat and undetailed suicide references, and notes that its sequences of discriminatory and racist behaviour are clearly condemned by the work as a whole. A good fit if you will sit with the daily routine of a man trying to get things done in a city whose language he does not speak. Not for anyone expecting the hunt for the killer to hold its pace.