‘To Catch a Killer’ Review: Shailene Woodley Hunts a Mass Shooter on the Loose in Baltimore

In 2014, Argentine writer-director Damian Szifron made a considerable splash with Wild Tales. The Oscar-nominated, Almodvar-produced feature consisted of six escalatingly over-the-top stories that put a blackly comic slant on human behaviors at their worst, adding up to a flamboyantly enjoyable whole. Its surprising that its taken him nearly a decade to deliver his next feature, and more surprising still that it turns out to be his English-language debut To Catch a Killer.

This Baltimore-set thriller, with Shailene Woodley as a cop helping FBI agent Ben Mendelsohn track down a mass shooter, is the screen equivalent of a page-turner: a solid investigative procedural that breaks no new ground, but delivers sufficient suspense, character interest, and action in confident fashion. Nonetheless, its a curiously impersonal, straight-ahead genre piece for a writer-director who so assertively staked out his terrain as an auteur the last time around. Vertical Entertainment is opening it on 500+ U.S. screens this Friday.

Amidst fireworks noise, attendees at a penthouse New Years Eve party are slow to realize theyre under lethal attack by sniper fire, as are others in the surrounding area. When police arrive and trace the trajectory of bullets, they figure the shooter is (or was) in a high-rise opposite a suspicion confirmed when a flat in that building explodes, erasing any evidence. By then, twenty-nine people have been killed by a marksman so expert that not a single shot missed, or merely wounded.

Among street cops initially responding to the emergency is Eleanor Falco (Woodley). Later, FBI investigator Lammark (Mendelsohn) overhears her speculations about the massacre while others assume some terrorist organization is involved, she thinks its a lone wolf and is impressed. He figures shes either got the makings of a good detective, is as messed-up as the perp, or, as it turns out, both. Hes an ornery, exacting type with little respect for local police personnel, so he requisitions this low-ranking officer as a liaison wholl work alongside him and his sole other chosen teammate, the more affable Mackenzie (Jovan Adepo).

Lammark is as yet unaware that Falco had previously applied to become an FBI agent, and failed the psychological testing. Shes something of a lone wolf herself, with a traumatic past that is not very well illuminated in Szifron and Jonathan Wakehams script, but which underlines a too-obvious debt to The Silence of the Lambs in drawing a dedicated but troubled female protagonist.

As police indiscriminately arrest every paranoid malcontent in sight, anxious to quell public pressure, our central trio search for their quarry in more methodical fashion. That frustrates politicians, media and other powers seeking quick results, a situation worsened when theres a second mass shooting, almost certainly by the same person. The films last half hour leaves the city for a wintry countryside where that murderer is in hiding, and their explanatory discontents (until recently, the project was titled Misanthrope) are revealed.

As that intel spills out in some awkward speechifying, its a bit too late to make any meaningful statement about the kind of resentful social isolation, conspiracy theorizing and bigotry that often seems to create such trigger-happy monsters today. Likewise, the complexities of Woodley and Mendelsohns difficult characters arent probed enough in the writing to feel fully realized, though both performers are fine.

Nonetheless, the film does work quite well as a procedural thriller, maintaining a tense, haunted atmosphere between peaks of skillfully realized action. Particularly good are scenes in which we know something terrible is about to happen in a mall food court, and a shootout in a chain drugstore Szifron (whos also editor here) and cinematographer Javier Julia make the bland brightness of those retail settings crackle with imminent danger.

The notion of city as potential target-shooting range is depicted vividly enough that theres something anticlimactic about the final rural stretch, competently staged as it is. Montreal stands in capably enough for Baltimore in a simultaneously sleek and gritty design package whose only duff note is a slight excess of aerial shots (and gimmicky upside-down perspectives) in Julias otherwise first-rate widescreen photography.

Indeed, the worst thing you can say about To Catch a Killer is that its so adeptly executed in all departments that one is disappointed it ends up feeling a tad generic. Its engrossing, sometimes exciting, yet never fully free from an overall sense of derivation. Its the classic case of a movie good enough, with sufficiently strong talent onboard, that you wonder why it isnt better why a progress that firmly holds a viewer for two hours leaves so fleeting an impression afterward.