Rogue City (2020)

Olivier Marchal's Rogue City arrives with the grim confidence of a filmmaker who has decided that Marseille is a wound that will not close. An anti-gang unit led by Richard Vronski stumbles through a mass shooting investigation while internal affairs breathes down its neck, rival narcotics officers circle, and the drug trade runs on schedule. The cast includes Kaaris and Moussa Maaskri among its ranks, and North African and West African faces populate the frame as ordinary residents of a city that has always looked this way. Nobody pauses to announce it. The demographics simply are what they are, which is its own quiet form of accuracy.

What the film declines to do is more instructive than what it attempts. There is no queer subplot, no arc about bodies and self-acceptance, no environmental lament, no neurodivergent detective whose difference grants special insight. Race hangs over the gang warfare like weather, unremarked and unexamined, never converted into thesis. Catherine Marchal's officer joins the unit and Leonetti's daughter carries a badge, but both function as plot machinery, not argument. The pervasive corruption gets no economic critique attached to it. The Bastianis run cocaine, the police skim cash, and the film shrugs. Cynicism this thorough has no room for a moral.

Which leaves the question of sermonizing. There is none. Rogue City is two hours of scowling men betraying one another in parking garages and creek beds, and it never stops to tell us what to think about any of it. A corrupt cop butchers his family offscreen. The mastermind walks free. The final shot watches a young woman about to die. Elisabeth Vincentelli called the movie radical in its nihilism, and she was being generous about the craft, not the message. Here is a thriller with no redemption and no lesson, only a body count and a boat. We have seen this before. We will see it again.