To Catch a Killer (2023)

The title card originally read Misanthrope, which tells you most of what the filmmakers thought they had. By the time Vertical Entertainment pushed To Catch a Killer into a limited theatrical run in April 2023, the misanthrope had been demoted to a marketing problem, and the film collected three million dollars and a shrug. Damián Szifrón, making his English-language debut, keeps the camera close and the weather miserable: Baltimore on New Year's Eve, a marksman working from a high rise, a body count delivered with bureaucratic calm. It is a competent procedural, and it claims nothing more for itself.

Shailene Woodley plays Eleanor Falco, a Baltimore officer with a troubled past and a good ear for how a killer reasons. She is capable, she is outnumbered by men in a conference room, and the screenplay declines to build any argument on top of that. Jovan Adepo's Mackenzie sits in the supporting chair as a Black agent whose race is simply not a subject. Ben Mendelsohn's Lammark turns out to have a husband, disclosed without ceremony, and the closing negotiation over that husband's pension is handled as an administrative errand. That restraint is the most interesting instinct the script has. It refuses to applaud itself.

The killer, Dean Possey, is a vegan, and the screenplay traces the habit to a slaughterhouse job in southern Maryland. This is character work, not an environmental sermon, though a viewer braced for a sermon will flinch at the setup. A contractor mentions hiring ex-cons because immigrants got too expensive, a line that lands and then evaporates. A cable news host whips the city into a frenzy, the Bureau chases a caller who turns out not to be the shooter, and a man dies for the ratings. The film gestures at institutional vanity without ever settling in to lecture. Eleanor ends the picture accepting a promotion in exchange for her silence about all of it. That is the joke nobody in the movie bothers to tell.