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To Catch a Killer Review: Shailene Woodley Hunts a Mass Shooter on the Loose in Baltimor

Argentine director Damian Szifon’s first English-language feature is an investigative thriller that’s expertly handled if a bit over-familiar.

In 2014, Argentine writer-director Damian Szifron made a considerable splash with “Wild Tales.” The Oscar-nominated, Almodóvar-produced feature consisted of six escalatingly over-the-top stories that put a blackly comic slant on human behaviors at their worst, adding up to a flamboyantly enjoyable whole. It’s surprising that it’s taken him nearly a decade to deliver his next feature, and more surprising still that it turns out to be his English-language debut “To Catch a Killer.” 

This Baltimore-set thriller, with Shailene Woodley as a cop helping FBI agent Ben Mendelsohn track down a mass shooter, is the screen equivalent of a page-turner: a solid investigative procedural that breaks no new ground, but delivers sufficient suspense, character interest, and action in confident fashion. Nonetheless, it’s a curiously impersonal, straight-ahead genre piece for a writer-director who so assertively staked out his terrain as an auteur the last time around. Vertical Entertainment is opening it on 500+ U.S. screens this Friday.

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Amidst fireworks noise, attendees at a penthouse New Year’s Eve party are slow to realize they’re under lethal attack by sniper fire, as are others in the surrounding area. When police arrive and trace the trajectory of bullets, they figure the shooter is (or was) in a high-rise opposite — a suspicion confirmed when a flat in that building explodes, erasing any evidence. By then, twenty-nine people have been killed by a marksman so expert that not a single shot missed, or merely wounded. 

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Among street cops initially responding to the emergency is Eleanor Falco (Woodley). Later, FBI investigator Lammark (Mendelsohn) overhears her speculations about the massacre — while others assume some terrorist organization is involved, she thinks it’s a lone wolf — and is impressed. He figures she’s either got the makings of a good detective, is as messed-up as the perp, or, as it turns out, both. He’s an ornery, exacting type with little respect for local police personnel, so he requisitions this low-ranking officer as a “liaison” who’ll work alongside him and his sole other chosen teammate, the more affable Mackenzie (Jovan Adepo). 

Lammark is as yet unaware that Falco had previously applied to become an FBI agent, and failed the psychological testing. She’s something of a lone wolf herself, with a traumatic past that is not very well illuminated in Szifron and Jonathan Wakeham’s script, but which underlines a too-obvious debt to “The Silence of the Lambs” in drawing a dedicated but troubled female protagonist. 

As police indiscriminately arrest every paranoid malcontent in sight, anxious to quell public pressure, our central trio search for their quarry in more methodical fashion. That frustrates politicians, media and other powers seeking quick results, a situation worsened when there’s a second mass shooting, almost certainly by the same person. The film’s last half hour leaves the city for a wintry countryside where that murderer is in hiding, and their explanatory discontents (until recently, the project was titled “Misanthrope”) are revealed.

As that intel spills out in some awkward speechifying, it’s a bit too late to make any meaningful statement about the kind of resentful social isolation, conspiracy theorizing and bigotry that often seems to create such trigger-happy monsters today. Likewise, the complexities of Woodley and Mendelsohn’s “difficult” characters aren’t probed enough in the writing to feel fully realized, though both performers are fine.

Nonetheless, the film does work quite well as a procedural thriller, maintaining a tense, haunted atmosphere between peaks of skillfully realized action. Particularly good are scenes in which we know something terrible is about to happen in a mall food court, and a shootout in a chain drugstore — Szifron (who’s also editor here) and cinematographer Javier Julia make the bland brightness of those retail settings crackle with imminent danger.

The notion of city as potential target-shooting range is depicted vividly enough that there’s something anticlimactic about the final rural stretch, competently staged as it is. Montreal stands in capably enough for Baltimore in a simultaneously sleek and gritty design package whose only duff note is a slight excess of aerial shots (and gimmicky upside-down perspectives) in Julia’s otherwise first-rate widescreen photography.  

Indeed, the worst thing you can say about “To Catch a Killer” is that it’s so adeptly executed in all departments that one is disappointed it ends up feeling a tad generic. It’s engrossing, sometimes exciting, yet never fully free from an overall sense of derivation. It’s the classic case of a movie good enough, with sufficiently strong talent onboard, that you wonder why it isn’t better — why a progress that firmly holds a viewer for two hours leaves so fleeting an impression afterward.

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‘To Catch a Killer’ Review: Shailene Woodley Hunts a Mass Shooter on the Loose in Baltimore

Reviewed online, March 10, 2023. MPAA rating: R. Running time: 119 MIN.

  • Production: A Vertical Entertainment release of a Vertical Entertainment, Filmnation Entertainment, Rainmaker Films presentation of a Filmnation Entertainment production. Producers: Aaron Ryder, Stuart Manashil, Damian Szifron, Shailene Woodley. Execudtive producers: Ben Basner, Alison Cohen, Milan Popelka, Michael A. Jackman, Clay Pecorin, Russell Geyser, Russ Posternak, Jane Sinisi. Co-producer: Paul Barbeau.
  • Crew: Director, editor: Damian Szifron. Screenplay: Szifron, Jonathan Wakeham. Camera: Javier Julia. Music: Carter Burwell. 
  • With: Shailene Woodley, Ben Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo, Ralph Ineson, Richard Zeman, Dusan Dukic, Jason Cavalier, Nick Walker, Darcy Laurie, Mark Camacho, Frank Schorpion.

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