Auld acquaintance should be forgotten, not sniped. Someone in Baltimore failed to get the message, killing 29 celebrants on New Year’s Eve from a downtown perch several stories up. As soon as the authorities determine where, the place explodes, leaving no DNA for them to trace.
What’s an FBI chief investigator to do? If you’re Agent Lammarck (Ben Mendelsohn, Ready Player One), you recruit beat cop Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley, the Divergent trilogy), because you sense the destructive force within her. Whereas the killer turns the harmful urge against others, she turns it against herself (i.e., she’s a cutter); therefore, she’s exactly who he needs.
To Catch a Killer, Wednesdays this fall on NBC.
Kidding about the TV part, although — generic James Patterson-esque title and everything — To Catch a Killer is the definition of crime procedural as comfort-food viewing. A couple of factors elevate it above network-tube fare. For one, Mendelsohn. Always fantastic, he’s a pleasure not only to watch, but to hear; his voice betters the material, as does the hands-and-fingers acting on display here — magnetic once you notice.
I run hot and cold on Woodley, but she’s fine as what is essentially a more paternally influenced take on Jodie Foster’s iconic role in The Silence of the Lambs. Woodley’s pairing with Mendlesohn is like Clarice Starling had spent hours with Agent Jack Crawford instead of Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
The movie’s other pinch of je ne sais quoi is Damián Szifron, the Argentinian director of 2014’s sharp, acidic anthology, Wild Tales, rightly Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. His camera is fluid and adept at zeroing in on unusual angles; showdown sequences in a mall and a drugstore ring with discomforting tension and demonstrate an impeccable control of timing. That’s why it’s so disheartening to watch Szifron give the eventually discovered killer the opportunity to deliver the de rigueur speech on Why He Is Who He Is.
Oddly, To Catch a Killer represents Szifron’s first gig since Wild Tales — an alarming, near-decade gap! How he went from something so unhinged to something that could end with Dick Wolf’s production company logo (not to mention a three-hour programming block along its spin-off series, To Catch a Killer: Seattle and To Catch a Killer: Behavioral Science Unit) is an even greater mystery than this one poses. Unlike Killer’s, it remains unsolved. —Rod Lott