#To Catch a Killer (2023)

[shaileneswoodley]

To Catch A Killer (2023) Trailer starring Shailene Woodley, Ben Mendelsohn and Ralph Ineson

[kuzzzma]

To Catch a Killer (2023) – is a strange film, that outright LIES to it’s intended viewers.

It’s not about how they are going to catch a killer, this title is just a feint, to fool critics and audience alike. The purpose of the film is to ask some very uncomfortable questions sneakily, so subtly that viewers are not even aware that they were asked anything, yet the question will linger and doubt will fester and maybe this will lead to finding some answers in oneself.

Problems stated, questions posed:

Homelessnes

Sexual harassment

Human and LGBT rights

Gun control

History

Racism

Sexism

Police bias

Media responsibility

Media sensationalism

Ecology

Pollution

Politics and populism

Workers rights

Police unprofessionalism

Police brutality

And it’s not an attack on any one country. You see people at the mall, workplace, struggles with higher-ups, who don’t care one bit about solving the crime, but only about how it will reflect on their political aspirations (and everything can be sacrificed for that). It’s universal.

I look at those human interactions and it’s the same everywhere. I look at these landscapes and see a typical Russian small town during winter:

РУС!реал

– How long have you been married? – Ever since we were allowed.

This snippet of dialog jolts the viewer with it’s choice of words: the notion that you need to be ALLOWED to get married feels instantly WRONG, and yet… I find it much more effective that just silently doing token “representation”.

This jolt is much needed, it shakes up viewer and pokes at their assumptions about what kind of film they are watching just in time to pose the main Question right in the next scene.

The Question is stated outright, as well as the answer author proposes and later puts to test.

Big question to ask.

– That’s the big question. How people shape systems and how systems shape us. Today it’s all about the STATUS. People who have it will kill to protect it. People who want it will kill to achieve it and everyone else will be crushed inbetween. Governments, corporations, high school.. pattern seems to be the same. – How do we change that? – You need empathy. Connection. If we truly see ourselves in other people, we want to raise them up, not bring them down.

This is exactly what our protagonist will try to do when facing their perpetrator – establish connection, empathise, work together.

The perpetrator with his need for space and time, with his cabin in the woods reminds me of Henry David Thoreau. He even looks like him!

In the last arc wounded and dying perpetrator is hunted down with the whole might of police force. It’s all blinking lights, whole fleet of cars, helicopters in the air, radio chatter and sirens, all hands on deck. Hunters form a line and their prey is trapped.

We got his tracks!

This comes after this man stated his need for quiet, desire and inability to hide from society.

Makes viewer feel sick long before suicide by the firing squad of cops.

It’s a strange sad film, but it’s got sharp teeth and claws, and it puts boredom, glory, beauty and horror on display:

Boredom and Glory.

Beauty.

Horror

The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. T.S. Eliot

[screenmovie]

Ben Mendelsohn as Lammark,

To Catch a Killer (2023), directed by Damián Szifron and written by him & Jonathan Wakeham.

[hawkstincan]

[ennaih]

Every Film I Watch In 2023:

94. To Catch A Killer (2023)

[leresq]

I've decided to record every single movie and TV show I finish during the month and list their rankings with just a simple score out of 100. Every time I rewatch a movie, I'll record it and a new score, so that way it's always updated.

December 2024

Wicked, 2024: 90/100

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981: 85/100

Blade Runner 2049, 2017: 85/100

Transformers Age of Extinction, 2014: 50/100

Transformers The Last Knight, 2017: 55/100

Bumblebee, 2018: 85/100

Knuckles, 2023: 70/100

Mission: Impossible, 1996: 75/100

Sonic the Hedgehog 3, 2024: 95/100

Cuckoo, 2024: 85/100

Tetris, 2023: 90/100

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003: 75/100

Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023: 80/100

Napoleon, Director's Cut, 2023: 70/100

Paranorman, 2012: 75/100

Zoolander, 2001: 60/100

Catch Me If You Can, 2002: 85/100

I know this is an insane amount of content but I had to watch more than usual because I got two different streaming services' week long free trials accidentally at two different times this month so I had to watch what I wanted fast.

[olvaheiner]

To Catch a Killer (2023)

[haverwood]

To Catch a Killer Damián Szifron USA, 2023 ★★ Subverting Expectations: The Movie

The thing with "subverting expectations" is that you gotta know when to stop. At some point, it'll become a cartoon.

Mess enough with them twists, you'll end up entangled too.

[kristenswig]

#119. To Catch a Killer - Damián Szifron

4/5

[adamwatchesmovies]

To Catch a Killer (2023)

I can see why some viewers may find To Catch a Killer unoriginal. The protagonist, the case itself and the conflicts competing with the case to make the investigation even harder than it needs to be have appeared in other stories before. I’m not sure I’ve seen them all in a movie together like this, however. There’s something about this unusually sympathetic film by Damián Szifron (co-written by him and Jonathan Wakeham) that struck a chord with me.

On New Year’s Eve in Baltimore, a sniper kills dozens of people at random. Police officer Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley) arrives on the scene, where her quick thinking impresses FBI Special Agent Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn). Together, they begin searching for the killer, noticing immediately that their actions don’t quite line up with those of typical mass shooters.

What’s unusual about this film is that no aspect of the story is glamorized. The sniper’s victims are alive one second and dead the next. Once people around them realize what happened, the camera moves to another scene where someone else is caught in the sniper's crosshairs. The investigation itself is bogged down with bureaucratic decisions that tell Eleanor catching this killer will be needlessly complicated. Baltimore’s mayor wants the shooter found but he can’t let a little thing like a city gripped in fear put a stop to his plans. Everyone seems more concerned with what will happen after the killer is stopped - who will get the credit, who will get the blame, etc. - than in the work necessary to stop the bloodshed.

The opening is brutal and chilling in its matter-of-factness. From there, director Damián Szifron makes the… unusual? controversial? choice to eventually have Eleanor and the shooter (played by Ralph Ineson) discover that they have more in common than they thought. With Ineson’s performance and the very real portrayal of mental illness plaguing his character, the film almost forces you to feel empathy for him. How could we not when we don’t see any of the victims before they become targets, we don’t meet their loved ones afterward and the authorities are so power-hungry, reckless and self-absorbed. I’m not sure how to feel about this. Yes, the killer is just a “regular” person with a family that loves him, an ordinary career and so on rather than some gun-crazy ghoul. It’s important to remember that even those who commit horrible things are human beings… but at the end of the day, the world would’ve been a better place if this person had never been born. If Eleanor ever sat down with anyone and told them that at the end of the day, the shooter wasn’t a monster, she’d have a mob of anguished brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, boyfriends, girlfriends and children coming after her with pitchforks and torches. To Catch a Killer suceeds in making you pause and think about how we should think about people who do bad things but the side it picks is one I don’t think most of us would ever choose in real life.

The maze of politics, bad decisions, occasional sympathy, quick thinking and violence in To Catch a Killer is engaging. I don’t know how memorable the film will be down the line because so many aspects have appeared elsewhere but that doesn’t mean it's not worth seeing. I’m certainly glad to have spent those 119 minutes with To Catch a Killer. (September 1, 2023)

[chinchillasorchildren]

Films of 2023: To Catch a Killer (dir. Damian Szifron)

Grade: C+

It passed the time.

[cinematitlecards]

"To Catch A Killer" (2023) Directed by Damián Szifron (Action/Crime/Drama)

[grigori77]

Movies of 2023 - My Summer Rundown (Part 1)

The Runners-Up:

20.  TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS – it’s telling that we didn’t get a truly GREAT live action Transformers movie until Michael Bay stepped back into a mere producer capacity and we got 2018’s brilliant soft-reboot Bumblebee.  This new film feels like something of a step back to Bay’s more OTT chaos, but they’ve still learned the lessons from that ridiculous excess to bring us a direct sequel to that ingenious restart, Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. going bigger this time but still reining in the excess with impressive focus for an explosively exciting and still endearingly heartfelt action adventure.  The end results are still clunky but a good deal better than Bay’s misfires, and entertaining, affecting and genuinely thrilling if you just let yourself go with it …

19.  TO CATCH A KILLER – honestly, I could hardly call Argentine filmmaker Damian Szifron’s taut suspense thriller an international big break considering it only received a limited theatrical release before becoming a relative promo-free sleeper on streaming, but this is one of those underdog movies that really deserves a lot more attention than it received.  Divergent’s Shailene Woodley is electrifying as Eleanor, a troubled Baltimore PD officer who, after a nightmarish sniper attack and bombing, becomes an unofficial investigator under the guidance of FBI manhunter Lammark (an ON-FIRE Ben Mendelsohn) as he races to track down a brutal domestic terrorist before they commit another atrocity.

18.  HEART OF STONE – Gal Gadot stretches her action heroine muscles outside of playing Wonder Woman as superspy Rachel Stone/Nine of Hearts, a top agent in a mysterious covert intelligent agency known as the Charter, who must go it alone when a former partner makes a play for the quantum computing AI that helps them fight international threats.  Director Tom Parker (The Aeronauts, Wild Rose, Peaky Blinders) reveals previously largely untapped action talent as he turns The Old Guard comics-writer’s blistering screenplay into an exciting, fast-paced action thriller that’s sure to impress fans of Netflix’ previous dabbles in the genre.

17.  ORGAN TRAIL – another indie underdog that snuck in VERY MUCH under the radar, this supremely twisted psychological horror western from Drop Dead Gorgeous director Michael Patrick Jann and newcomer screenwriter Meg Turner deserves A WHOLE LOT of attention.  Zoe De Grand Maison (Orphan Black, Riverdale) lights up the screen as Abigail Archer, a young girl in snow-bound 1870s Montana who’s forced to grow up REAL FAST when her family is murdered by a band of marauding outlaws who make a brutal living attacking travelling groups of would-be settlers for their money and supplies.

16.  INDIANA JONES & THE DIAL OF DESTINY – 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was such a disappointment compared to the giddy heights of Steven Spielberg’s original stone-cold CLASSIC action adventure trilogy that I went into this film with very low expectations, so I was VERY PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see that this is actually a whole lot of fun and a GLORIOUS return to form for Harrison Ford’s now VERY OLD Nazi-fighting treasure hunter and professor of archaeology.  With Spielberg and George Lucas largely stepping back into producing duties here, Logan writer-director James Mangold has taken up the reins instead, delivering an engagingly nostalgic thrill-ride which beautifully redeems Indiana Jones for a new generation while also giving the character a suitably grand send-off …

15.  THE PRINCE – while not technically a feature film, I was SO thoroughly impressed by this filmed performance of the revolutionary Shakespearean deconstruction play by actress, playwright and influential YouTuber Abigail Thorn that I couldn’t resist giving it a nod here.  Thorn shines bright as a distinctly unconventional take on Harry “Hotspur” Pierce in Henry IV, an anthropomorphised play character who becomes ensnared in a radical shake-up of their life-story when a pair of humans from THE REAL WORLD become trapped in the play itself and wind up entirely sabotaging the narrative.  It’s a fascinating experience, a revolutionary game-changer of a show which takes Shakespeare and turns his works ENTIRELY on their head while addressing important themes of genre identity, sexuality and intolerance, and this is glaring proof that this is a production which deserves to be seen whether it’s in this Nebula video presentation or performed live on stage.

14.  BARBIE – Oppenheimer’s bizarre unexpected twin when it came to be released in cinemas is, in many ways, just as important a film, but for very different reasons.  After languishing in Development Hell since 2009, writer-director Greta Gerwig finally realised this genuinely BIZARRE screwball comedy sort-of biopic of the iconic fashion doll range from Mattel, unleashing the character upon the world IN THE LIVING FLESH in the simply PERFECT (from a casting point of view) form of Margot Robbie.  She’s simply AMAZING here as “Stereotypical Barbie”, who finds herself going through an existential crisis after some girl starts “playing with her wrong” in the real world, but the film is frequently stolen right out from under her by Ryan Gosling as her so-called boyfriend Ken, who went ALL OUT to bring the most fundamentally useless boy-toy in history to life …

13.  MEG 2: THE TRENCH – supremely creepy indie cinema director Ben Wheatley may seem like a distinctly ODD choice to helm a follow-up to 2018’s most delightfully off-the-wall runaway action horror smash hit, but he actually proves to be a perfect hit because he clearly GETS the inherent silliness of this franchise.  Cinema’s all-time greatest living “special effect”, Jason Statham, returns as deep sea rescue diver and professional giant shark-puncher Jonas Taylor, once again wrapped up in a whole heap of trouble when not one but this time THREE massive prehistoric megaladons escape the abyssal Trench and start munching on South Pacific tourists, but this time matters are further complicated when he also has to deal with a conglomerate of dastardly strip-miners looking to exploit the Trench’s rare earth metal resources for their own ends …

12.  THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL & HER MONSTER – debuting writer-director Bomani J. Story brings Frankenstein to the inner-city projects as haunted teenage genius Vicaria (the new TV series of The Equalizer’s Laya DeLeon Hayes) reanimates her gangbanger big brother Chris (Kill a Prophet and Warrior Soul’s Edem Atsu-Swanzy) after he’s gunned down in a turf war.  The results are a dark and disturbing slowburn psychological body horror that deals head-on with socially resonant issues of drugs, urban poverty and gang culture while also delivering a unique and challenging new twist on one of the most classic stories in the history of science-fiction and horror …

11.  TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM – another animated feature that’s following the inventive new lead of the Spider-Verse movies, this latest big screen incarnation for Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s zeitgeisty comics creations is a genuine riot which takes the original core concept and runs it through a delightfully skewed comedic blender to form a compelling new narrative basis for what’s sure to be a fantastic new film series.  Comedy screenwriting/producing masters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg team up with up-and-coming young writer-director Jeff Rowe (The Mitchells Vs. the Machines) to bring the youthful mutant quartet to vivid life with plenty of visual flair, anarchic chaotic humour and a whole lot of heart, and I for one can’t wait for more.

[screenmovie]

Ben Mendelsohn as Lammark,

To Catch a Killer (2023), directed by Damián Szifron and written by him & Jonathan Wakeham.

[moviesandmania]

TO CATCH A KILLER (2023) Crime thriller with Shailene Woodley - trailer and release news

To Catch a Killer is a 2023 American crime thriller in which a talented yet troubled police officer is recruited by the FBI’s chief investigator to help profile and track down an elusive mass murderer. Also titled Misanthrope Directed and co-produced by Damián Szifron (Wild Tales; On Probation;  The Bottom of the Sea) from a screenplay co-written with Jonathan Wakeham. Also produced by Aaron…

[gebo4482]

To Catch A Killer | Official Trailer | Sky Cinema

Dir: Damián Szifron Star: Shailene Woodley / Ben Mendelsohn / Jovan Adepo.