Parky At the Pictures (16/10/2026)

(Reviews of Case 137; It's My Time; and The Influencer Project)

CASE 137.

Between winning the César for Best Director for Harry, He's Here to Help (2000) and The Night of the 12th (2022), it's fair to say that Dominik Moll has enjoyed mixed fortunes. Although Lemming (2005) opened the Cannes Film Festival, it divided critics, while The Monk (2011), News From Planet Mars (2016), and Only the Animals (2019) were little seen in the UK. He's on fine form, however, with Case 137 (aka Dossier 137), a police procedural that received eight César nominations in earning Léa Drucker the award for Best Actress.

Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker) is an inspector with the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IPGN). In interviewing a cop with an unblemised 15-year record for throwing a stone during the gilets jaunes protests in December 2018, she maintains a detached front. But, in calling her superior, she recommends going easy on a decent man who cracked under pressure.

Among the complaints against the police on the Champs-Elysées is one from Joëlle Girard (Sandra Colombo), a nursing auxiliary from St Dizier, who reports that her 20 year-old apprentice electrician son, Guillaume (Côme Péronnet), was shot in the head by a cop. Her daughter's boyfriend, Rémi Cordier (Valentin Campagne), witnessed the incident. But he was arrested and she doesn't know if he is still in custody.

Driving home, Stéphanie asks her mother whether she knows the Girard family, as she also hails from St Dizier. Having rescued a white kitten from behind a grille in her building car park, Stéphanie gets a call from her 12 year-old son, Victor (Solan Machado Graner), who has been left in the car while his father, Jérémy (Stanislas Merhar), jogs with his new girlfriend, Noélie (Antonia Buresi), who is also a cop.

After a chain of formal requests, Stéphanie and Benoît Guérini (Jonathan Turnbull) interview Rémi, who doesn't see the point of co-operating, as no one will ever accept his word over that of a cop. They also speak to girlfriend Sonia (Mathilde Riu) and her brother, Antonin (Yannick Morzelle), and we see phone footage of them en route to Paris to see the sights and lend their support to the protests because they think the level of social services in St Dizier is so poor. The cam-shots are intercut with the interviews, in which Stéphanie quizzes Rémi about his actions before and after the shooting and whether he has any right-leaning affiliations. He insists Guillaume suffered an unprovoked attack and he stayed with him until an ambulance arrived. His arrest came an hour later, as he tried to find the shooters (who he reckons were plain clothes cops) and he denies using any violence towards the officers who beat him.

Stéphanie examines CCTV footage checked by colleague Camille Delarue (Mathilde Roehrich) and they interview the operation leaders for the units supporting the Paris police. They admit that shots were fired, but insist they were doing their duty to protect the Republic in a war zone. None recognise the unit that Camille had identified as being in the vicinity of where Guillaume was shot, although some admit that the policing had hardly been textbook.

On a night bowling with her team, Stéphanie bumps into Jérémy and Noélie and is irritated when the latter asks why she left narcotics to investigate fellow officers at a time when cop-bashing is so prevalent. Stéphanie refuses to discuss her work, but insists union solidarity with other cops is no excuse for tolerating unprofessional behaviour.

Walking BRI officer Frédéric Picard (Steve Driesen) through facial images that Benoît has found, Stéphanie dismantles his disdain by presenting his earlier claim that officers had bought helmets from Decathlon because there hadn't been time to get proper kit. Politely acknowledging his superiority, she coaxes him into identifying Clément Garcia (Alexandre Auvergne), Michel Brzezenski (Gabriel Almaer), Arnaud Lavallée (Théo Navarro-Mussy), Sébastien Jacquet (Marc Lamigeon), and Mickaël Fages (Théo Navarro-Mussy).

When questioned, none recalls anyone being injured and they claim ignorance of the street layout because it's not their part of town. Their answers are terse, but Stéphanie opts not to venture an opinion about whether they were covering for each other. With Gaillaume still unable to talk, she takes Victor and Yoghurt the kitten to St Dizier to stay with her parents, Sylvie (Geneviève Mnich) and Gérard (Christian Sinniger) so that she can find out more about the Girards.

She spots Joëlle and Sonia in the supermarket and they accuse her of spying on them. Assuaged by her ID confirming St Dizier as her birthplace, they ask why progress is so slow when Rémi was jailed within minutes and lost his job as a nursing auxiliary after serving three months. They sneer at Stéphanie's assurance that progress is being made, with Joëlle being particularly indignant because she had looked after Sylvie when she had broken her wrist. When she asks her mother about it, she shrugs and says she feels sorry for the boy and Stéphanie gets cross because she always takes the populist side against the police. Back in Paris, Victor asks her why everyone hates the cops and she admits it's not a likeable job, but it needs doing and people should trust them.

Examining video footage, Stéphanie spots someone at a hotel window overlooking the shooting scene and she and Benoît interview maid Alicia Mady (Guslagie Malanda), who was turning down the bed linen at the stipulated time. She is anxious and admits to only watching the paramedics treating the injured man, but Stéphanie is convinced she is too afraid to reveal what else she witnessed. Taking a chance, she follows Alicia on two trains and follows her home. Frustrated that she has witnessed so many banlieue kids being stopped and searched by racist cops, Alicia asks if this case is only being followed up because the victim was a white boy. Stéphanie tries to reassure her, but Alicia responds that no cop will ever be dismissed for their actions, no matter what the evidence. However, she agrees to share the phonecam footage she took of the shooting, but asks Stéphanie not to come to her apartment, as it would make her look bad with her neighbours.

On seeing the footage, Stéphanie identifies Guillaume and Rémi posed no threat to the cops and were running away when Lavallée and Fages fired at them. She wants to interview them simultaneously so they can't agree their stories, but Fages is on sick leave. Lavallée denies aiming at anyone's head and claims all the demonstrators on 8 December posed a threat. When she shows him Fages kicking Guillaume, he suggests he was preventing him from reaching for something that could harm him.

When he's brought in, Fages also swears (with his lawyer present) that he didn't aim at Guillaume's head and claims he kicked him because he sensed he was going to grab his leg and pull him over. Stéphanie makes it clear she disbelieves him and dismisses his contention that the footage is to hazy to reach any conclusions. Both men are charged, however.

When she meets Jérémy at Victor's karate club display, Stéphanie defends her actions, even though the two suspects are members of the Search and Investigation Brigade (BRI) that had responded to the Bataclan shootings. She reminds her ex that she had transferred to IGPN so she could look after their son and he could continue his career in narcotics. Moreover, she says the union can bleat all it wants because someone has to root out the bad apples and she takes pride in what she does, if no pleasure in busting fellow officers.

She is furious when her superiors release Lavallée and Fages because of unrest in the ranks. A ballistics reconstruction fails to determine which officer shot Guillaume and the case is dropped. Stéphanie drives to St Dizier to tell Joëlle in person. When she says she did her best, Joëlle asks what the point of her job is when legal loopholes will always favour the cops. And Stéphanie is left wondering why she bothers when her boss (Florence Viala) admonishes her for not declaring a tie to St Dizier and the Girards that could be used by the defence and discredit the IGPN. On being told she will be investigated, but not punished, Stéphanie folds her arms in disbelief after having pursued the leads when others would have given up.

Back home, she watches cat videos and the tone of her chuckles concerns Victor, who asks if she is okay. She tries to give him a reassuring smile, but her heart isn't in it, as her father's warning rings in her ears: `When everyone's brainwashed and democracy's dead, you'll regret watching so many kitties.'

After a year of treatment, Guillaume is finally able to give a spoken statement. He explains how his life has been ruined by two men who have got away with their reckless actions. As he falls silent, we cut back to him singing happily in the car en route to Paris for what should have been a fun day, with a bit of social protest on the side. The point is well made.

Compelling throughout and doggedly provocative in the questions it raises and the conclusions it draws, this treatise on police accountability could be made in most countries in the world, as as accusations of institutional racism, corruption, and moral abnegation are almost universal. Yet, without police forces to uphold the law, societies would be ungovernable and Dominik Moll and co-scenarist Gilles Marchand refuse to duck the thorny issues raised by their fact-based storyline.

Every aspect of Stéphanie's life makes her job more difficult. She takes her duties as a daughter and mother as seriously as she does her job, but only her immediate colleagues seem aware of the pressure she is under and the impact such stress can have on a private life. Given his awareness of Victor's shame at having cops for parents, her ex-husband should certainly have a better idea than most, especially as she only took the job to raise their child. But he follows the lead of his new partner in considering the IGPN to be traitors for not putting up a united front against a hostile populace.

Stéphanie's integrity drives Léa Drucker's outstanding performance, which not only captures the constraints put upon IGPN officers from within the force, but also the disdain they face from a public unaware of the reasons why making wrongdoers pay is so difficult. The exchange between Stéphanie and Alicia feels rather laboured, but the issues it raises strike at the very heart of anti-police antagonism on the margins and lower rungs among those who are consistently targeted and scapegoated without recourse. The fact that the woman catch sight of each other during the ballistics set-up confirms that suspicions and prejudices will linger as long as neither side stands any chance to winning against such stacked odds.

Dwelling on the quotidian tasks that have to be completed in order to advance each stage of an inquiry, Moll and editor Laurent Rouan reveal that there's little to be gained from playing by the book. Yet straying from approved procedures is fraught with its own dangers, especially in an age of incessant surveillance and social media chat storms, which can be whipped into an outrage. There have been those who have viewed this tack as generic and over-emphatic in reaching the conclusion that moral rectitude matters less in the modern age than being on the right side. But the gravity of the topic and the intricacy of the detail demand an old-fashioned policier approach that puts Drucker's performance on a par with those of such predecessors as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura - not that they watched cat videos, of course.

IT'S MY TIME.

Eight years after making her acclaimed debut with The Crossing (2018), Bai Xue returns to UK screens with her sophomore outing, It's My Time. Based on a true story, this is Michelle Yeoh's first Chinese picture since Yuen Woo-ping's Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (2018), as well as her first since she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022).

Heavily in debt, former Rubik's Cube champion, Wu Youwei (Liu Haoran), agrees to teach the maths puzzle to the residents of the Evergreen Nursing Home. Cantankerous 70 year-old, Zhao Yanhong (Michelle Yeoh), takes exception to the 24 year-old alcoholic dozing off during the lesson and completes a cube in five minutes to the delight of her friend, Shuzhen (Rina Sa), whose phone footage goes viral.

Director Zheng (Tian Yu) fires Youwei for getting the residents over-excited, but Yanhong uses her robot carer's computer to look him up and realises he's a wasted talent. As a maths teacher, she had striven to get the best out of her students. But she has been confined to Evergreen since suffering a stroke after losing her home in a fraud scam and feels guilty that office drone son Dong Dawei (White-K) is having to pay her fees.

Learning from Boss Hu (Liu Yang) that she can make money from her Rubik skills, Yanhong hires Youwei to be her coach and she billets him in a storage room at the home to stop him from sleeping rough at the market. He has her build thousands of cubes from loose pieces in order to teach her the mechanics of the device and she frequently comes close to losing her temper, as she slogs and he lounges around. But Youwei also shows her how to hold the cube to improve her speed because she is going to have to get down to solving puzzles in under 40 seconds in order to qualify for major competitions.

Starting off in a small way, at an event with a push scooter as the first prize, Yanhong beats cocky 10 year-old Wang Tianze (Feng Zixuan). Youwei uses the scooter to accompany Yanhong on training runs to boost her stamina and organises challenges against talented teens to sharpen her competitive edge. She also studies the mathematics of Rubik's Cube permutations in a montage that culminates in her breaking 20 seconds, the time Youwei reckons she will need to match to beat Doctor K (Jiang Qiming) on a reality TV show recommended by Boss Hu so that Yanhong can start earning big bucks.

While celebrating in a restaurant, Yanhong is threatened by Youwei's creditor, Xiao Cui (Wu Hankun), who gives him a week to pay off his debts. Having beaned his nemesis with a bottle after he threatened Yanhong, Youwei divulges that he is paying off his absconded father's debts and Yanhong confides that she also had to struggle to raise her son after his father was killed in a car crash when he was three. She promises to buy Youwei a house so he will have somewhere to call his own and urges him to stop blaming himself for his mother's death.

Doctor K turns out to be insufferable and Yanhong takes great pleasure in defeating him in a `three bullets' contest, in which players can challenge each other to solve three cubes set up to expose their weaknesses. With Youwei's help, Yanhong bamboozles Doctor K and Boss Hu insists on entering her for the world championships. As the entry standard is 10 seconds, Youwei suggests delaying a year, but Yanhong is determined to give it a go.

However, she has so many products to endorse that she cuts back on practice time. Yanhong also has a row over dinner with daughter-in-law Manting (Qi Xi), who resents her criticising Dawei for working hard to provide for their daughter. She even falls out with the devoted Shuzhen by calling her a coward for not following her heart and moving to America to be with her daughter. These problems contribute to Yanhong's failure to qualify for the world championships and she realises that Youwei is right when he accuses her of having let fame and fortune go to her head.

Learning that Shuzhen has decided to emigrate, Yanhong says she'll miss her and thinks back to when her friend had saved her from a poisonous snake when they were girls. However, Shuzhen dies suddenly and Yanhong sits beside her body while recalling how she had looked after Dawei after she had been widowed and had moved into the home to show solidarity. Tearfully, Yanhong begs Shuzhen not to forget her and vows to make the most of her opportunity because life passes far too quickly.

Yanhong gets off to a bad start, however, as she has a blazing row with Youwei, who is worried she will harm herself if she trains 18 hours a day in an effort to break 10 seconds. She ditches him as her coach and spends hours in Boss Hu's offices speed-solving cubes. When she does finally hit 9:98, she collapses and damages her eyes. Dawei and Manting chastise Boss Hu for forcing her to sign a declaration that his company was not to blame for her misfortune. But Dawei also seeks out Youwei and persuades him to coach his mother in the blindfold event at the world championships and Yanhong agrees to renew their partnership.

One year later, Yanhong is greeted as a celebrity at the worlds, where she qualifies from the semi-final with 10/20 completed cubes. She is up against Hungarian Daniel Kovách (Jason Dane) in the final and he goes on to win. But the other competitors drop out and Yanhong beats the odds by crawling blindfolded on the floor for a popped red piece to retrieve it and slot it into her third completed cube to take the runner-up spot. Hugged by her family and cheered by the crowd. Yanhong nods to Youwei and thinks of Shuzhen, as she raises her arms in triumph.

This engaging variation on the sporting underdog story draws to a close with footage of Michelle Yeoh meeting the real-life model for her character, Zhao Wenying. Captions explain how her journey differed from the one concocted by Bai Xue and fellow writers, Sun Yan and Xu Yizhou. But their blend of feel-good and pathos succeeds, thanks to Bai's enterprising direction and Yeoh's impeccably judged performance.

For those unaware how huge competitive speedcubing has become, the final sequence may seem a bit over-the-top. Yet, while the world championships are genuinely staged with similar razzmatazz, the coda's sudden shift away from the intimate nature of the Evergreen sequences feels more than a little jarring. Editor Huang Shang had contributed several montages which has been variously summatory, comic, or sentimental. But the punchier cutting designed to ratchet up the tension of the grand finale has the effect of distancing the viewer from Yanhong, whose personality appears to have undergone something of a transformation over the intervening year.

This is all the more frustrating because Bai had already departed from the no-nonsense style employed during the first two-thirds of the picture to introduce a mawkish note following Shuzhen's demise. Such tonal dislocations disrupt the narrative flow and tend to throw the viewer out of the story.

As does the CGI trickery used to speed up the fingers manipulating the puzzles. Yeoh spent two years mastering the Rubik's Cube, but Bai might have included the odd close-up of a genuine master to give the audience a clearer idea of the speed they can attain. Nevertheless, Yeoh handles the technical side of her role well, while also conveying the pain behind Yanhong's temper. She is ably supported by an ensemble that rounds out what are essentially caricatures to genial effect. Liu Haoran might have been given more emotional baggage to carry, while the Xiao Cui subplot gets lost in the mix (what happens, for example, to his seven-day deadline after the bottle incident?). Such quibbles aside, this is a lively introduction to an unbeknownst milieu that will have many rummaging in boxes and cupboards for that long-forgotten toy that turns out to be a mathematical marvel boasting 43.2 quintillion combinations.

THE INFLUENCER PROJECT.

Don't be fooled by the strapline, `From the creators of The Blair Witch Project,' as the presence of co-director Eduardo Sanchez among the producers does little to raise Mike Nybroe's debut feature, The Influencer Project, above the myriad of feeble found footage imitations.

After Alma (Ronja Hauge Schierup) tells her social media followers that she's going to go viral, the Danish teenager hangs herself. In another part of cyberspace, Chiara (Chiara King) is seen on various platforms discussing how a kissing video got her noticed by Alice (Jazmine Summer), the agent who is going to help her achieve her goal of having 10 million followers. She hopes that a promotional trip to Copenhagen will help her and has agreed to be followed by a small documentary crew, consisting of director Mike (Mike Nybroe), cameraman Victor (Luca Storm), and sound recordist Daniel (Daniel Parmo).

According to Anna (Gemma Karlsen), the plan is for Chiara to visit landmarks around the capital, while modelling clothes and other accoutrements, in order to boost tourism. However, she is unnerved when king_slayer_xx99 sends her a threat on Instagram that he will rape and kill her unless she stops posting. As he included images of her arriving at the airport, Chiara is scared, but not enough to miss out on a lucrative opportunity.

On Day Two, Chiara visits clothing and jewellery shops to pick up items to model. She has a deal to post five times a day on TikTok and Instagram, but she can product place and hopes to make money while racking up the followers. A trip to a haunted house is on the itinerary and there are two jolt cut in a bid to raise a scream from someone other than Chiara. But she emerges unscathed, only to receive another message from King Slayer.

Day Three opens with Alice telling Chiara to come home if she doesn't feel safe. However, she is reluctant to miss out on a big payday and spends the morning jamming with musician Gustav Wolter and telling him about her experiences on The X Factor during Covid. As they look at the footage of the session, however, she is spooked by a remix posted by King Slayer, who appears in a mask in a jump cut, and Chiara is unamused when Wolter chuckles.

After Chiara nearly crashes into a car by riding on the wrong side of the road while cycling, Daniel reveals that he has tracked the chainmail mask to a new account that was opened solely to give her a fright. He also finds images of someone wearing the mask while working at the old shipyard. After shooting a scene of Chiara wandering the Tivoli Gardens at night, Mike trawls through the airport footage with her and they freeze frame on a blurred figure in the middle distance who might be wearing a mask.

Awoken in the night by somebody knocking on the wrong door in the apartment building where she's staying, Chiara embarks upon Day Four with an increase in her followers, as they evidently like to see her being frightened. She refuses to allow King Slayer to dictate terms and she goes to a market to look for bargains. Picking up a troll, she jokes that this one is different to the one trailing her as it's been touched by a woman. However, the crew realise that King Slayer is live streaming Chiara's every move and he walks right behind her when Victor and Mike try to corner him.

Day Five sees Chiara consult behaviourist Maia Kahlke Lorentzen and she explains that people feel free to insult social media personalities because they have chosen to be in the limelight. She also warns Chiara that responding to King Slayer could boost his ego. However, Maia also suggests luring him out so that he can be unmasked. This leads to an online rally by Chiara's followers and they abuse King Slayer to the extent that his profile is taken down and she celebrates by dancing in a silver spangly dress at a nightclub.

With everyone around her wearing masks, Chiara is assaulted on the dance floor. But no one is able to stop the culprit, who she denounces in a video message. She is still shaken as Day Six dawns and Alice arranges for Rasmus (Eos Karlsson) to be her security guard. When Mike tells Chiara that the King Slayer profile has been re-activated, she asks Victor if he entirely trusts the director because she is worried that he is behind the trolling (either because he's a sicko or because he wants to get a better film).

Following a message, Chiara goes to a car park to rendezvous with someone claiming to be King Slayer. After a nervous wait, a man pounces on her and is arrested after the camera crew chase and pummel him. He claims to have been paid to keep the assignation and is still in police custody when King Slayer appears behind Chiara while she is making a funny face thank you message for her followers. The cops confirm that the car park man is not King Slayer and Chiara tells Mike to stop filming because she's had enough. Despite Victor mutinying, he keeps shooting and is on hand to see Alice confess that she hired King Slayer because Chiara had said she would do whatever it takes to boost subscribers and Alice realised that subjecting her to terror would bring people flocking in.

With promises of $1 million for the film rights and contracts with major brands, Chiara feels the anguish has been worthwhile. On the last day of her stay, she agrees to go to a spooky location to meet her predator because Alice thinks it's important that her followers have a sense of closure. As they drive to the venue, Chiara tells Mike that she will have words with Alice about stage-managing things because her fans have genuine feelings for her and she doesn't want to serve them anything inauthentic.

On arrival, there's no sign of Alice and the lights don't work. Creeping around in the dark, Chiara gets a link to a live stream of Alice apologising before she's murdered. With no idea what is happening, Chiara freezes and is captured by King Slayer (Alexandre Willaume), who demands to know why she wants to poison the minds of young people by making them craven and crass with her consumerist claptrap.

He turns out to be Alma's father and he ties a rope around her neck attached to a winch. Turning to his phone, he explains to those watching the live stream that Chiara will be raised off the ground unless people stop watching. As he knows they would rather witness something grotesque rather than save her, he isn't surprised when she is soon dangling in mid-air. At that moment, Mike leaps in to kill King Slayer and release Chiara. But Victor turns out to have been Alma's brother and he slays his boss and chases after the fleeing Chiara. She has picked up his father's knife, however, and uses it to stab him Victor. When his corpse plummets off a gantry, the texters go wild on the live feed because their heroine has taken a life. One even calls it `the best live stream ever'. The click counter passes 10 million, as Chiara cuts the connection.

A post-credit phonecam shot shows Alma's grave covered in flowers and tributes. A message types up calling on people to join the King Slayer Army because there are so many influencers out there to be slaughtered. You have to give Nybroe some credit for having the audacity to believe that anyone would want a sequel to this competent, but vapid slasher. Maye they do and you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be a social media campaign designed to drum up the likes.

In many regards, influencers are the spawn of Reality TV. They sustain the notion that everyday celebrities are more relatable than those with genuine talent, when, in fact, they are simply cheaper and more disposable. In fairness, 27 year-old Chiara King does a decent job of slipping between acting and being performative in a meta-satire that covers much the same ground as Magnus von Horn's Sweat (2020) and Quinn Shephard's Not Okay (2022). Yet, while this skewers the vacuity of the social mediaverse capably enough, it lacks the incision and insight to really dissect its baffling appeal and its evident pitfalls.

Nybroe appears to be interested in the implosion of Chiara's identity in extremis. But he doesn't give her a sufficiently defined personality or a discernable set of aspirations to make viewers care about her plight. She simply comes across as naively self-obsessed and delusionally entitled, with her fixation on monetising her fame clouding her judgement where her own safety is concerned. Why not simply go home and exploit the brush with danger to elicit sympathy and more clicks?

It doesn't take a horror aficionado to realise that King Slayer is related to the hanged teenager in the otherwise pointless opening sequence or that Alice is behind some of the stalking because she has recognised that peril impacts on follower figures. But Nybroe is too preoccupied with switching between camera formats to sustain the stylistic conceit (which he frequently cheats) to devote much time to plausibility. Daniel Parmo's jittery cinematography is solid enough, while Anders Jon gives the edit a pugnacious energy. But the visuals feel both contrived and formulaic. Moreover, found footage films should never have music as it proves a non-diegetic distraction, especially when it's as clumsy and crass as the score contributed by DJ White Shadow and Matthew `MFR' Richert.

No doubt Nybroe and King will resurface, whether together or in isolation. But they will be better off for this experience, as it's a useful showreel even though it's not much of a horror film.