Baltimore. New Year’s Eve. A talented but troubled police officer (Shailene Woodley) is recruited by the FBI’s chief investigator (Ben Mendelsohn) to help profile and track down a disturbed individual terrorizing the city.
“To Catch a Killer” opens with the perfunctory ringing in of the New Year as pretty much an excuse to take selfies with near-strangers and party like imbeciles – all to celebrate the passage of time or perhaps to pine for a future that’s better than the past. In short, banality at its most conspicuous. As a species, humans generally tend to follow the same patterns.
The hackneyed festivities come to an abrupt halt when revelers in downtown Baltimore start getting picked off one by one by an unseen sniper. The midnight pops of fireworks mask the rifle reports – each shot hitting home with pinpoint accuracy – small entrance wounds, gaping exits, a single bullet per victim.
After briefly responding to a trivial incident at a diner, beat cop Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley) receives an all-call as residents and visitors flee randomly in terror. Despite the ubiquitous police presence, the shooter downs 29 victims. When the action appears to subside, an explosion rips through a high-rise apartment, drawing area law enforcement in like a magnet.
With a precociousness belying her youth, Eleanor instructs a fellow officer to record the faces of the fleeing tenants in case one of them is the killer. She then scurries up 17 flights of stairs to survey the crime scene, inhaling copious quantities of smoke in the hallways. After Eleanor succumbs to the fumes and collapses, Jovan Adepo, as FBI agent Jack MacKenzie, administers oxygen to her.
In the early hours of the investigation, Falco catches the eye of lead special agent Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn), who likes her unconventional thinking. He appoints her liaison between the FBI and the Baltimore Police Department, after which Lammark learns that Eleonor had applied to the bureau eight years previous but was rejected. The opportunity to help Lammark work the case gives Falco something of a second chance.
During initial meetings with the core investigative team, Eleanor asks prescient and counterintuitive questions, such as the origin of the shooter’s very old weapon and who might be using it. This sort of insight is precisely what Lammark wants. The politicians, however, blindly go after anything that moves, chasing red herrings left and right. They pull the investigative team away from sound evidence, wasting valuable time to maintain a positive image. Lammark laments to Eleanor that he can only push so hard against the machine; otherwise, the powers that be will replace him like an expendable part.
Although shrouded in the veneer of a crime drama somewhat resembling “The Silence of the Lambs,” the film deftly takes on more significant societal issues that too often go unappreciated. A macho G-man, Lammark is also a legally married gay man. Falco, on the other hand, constantly struggles to find her footing in a male-dominated world. There are references to lost Department of Defense weapons caches during the Iraq war, likely headed for the streets. Affluent mall shoppers are juxtaposed with homelessness and poverty. Outside the city, sprawling public landfills make a farce out of recycling, framed by the ordered skyline in the distance and doubling as the source of the ever-growing mountains of refuse.
After one of the shooting incidents, law enforcement quickly asserts without substantiation that the assailant is a short husky black man, when the actual perpetrator named Dean (Ralph Ineson) is over six feet tall and clearly white. In the latter stages of the criminal pursuit, Lammark and Falco tour a slaughterhouse where Dean worked years before; at this point, the horrors of an abattoir take center stage.
Originally released as “Misanthrope,” the title was changed against the wishes of writer/director Damian Szifron and co-writer Jonathan Wakeham. The closing scenes between Eleanor and Dean highlight the contradictions that the troubled man, relegated to living off the grid, has wrestled with throughout life. His remarks conclude with the observation that the entire planet has become a prison – with its fenced properties, surveillance cameras on every street, satellites in space, and drones lurking everywhere. It’s a place where Dean feels trapped but one in which Eleanor remains determined to change despite the odds stacked against her.
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