A young gendarme captain takes on a murder case that refuses to close, and the not-knowing becomes its own kind of sentence.
What is The Night of the 12th about?
When a young woman is found burned to death near a small French town, Captain Yohan Vaudel and his partner work through a widening circle of the victim's ex-boyfriends, chasing leads that keep dissolving on contact. Dominik Moll's 2022 procedural, set in Belgium and France, follows the investigation across years rather than days, letting the case go cold, get reopened, and cold again. Rather than building toward a tidy reveal, the film studies what an unsolved crime does to the people assigned to solve it: the doubt that creeps into routine, the frustration of interviewing men who all had motive and no proof, the slow erosion of certainty about how well anyone can really know another person's private cruelty. Bastien Bouillon anchors the film as Vaudel, with Bouli Lanners as his more weathered colleague, and the ensemble of suspects played by Théo Cholbi, Johann Dionnet, and Thibaut Évrard gives the case its uncomfortable, ordinary texture.
About the cast
Bastien Bouillon leads as the investigator whose composure gradually cracks, opposite Bouli Lanners as a partner running out of patience with the case and with himself. Anouk Grinberg, Mouna Soualem, and Pauline Serieys round out a supporting cast built around the people orbiting the investigation rather than a single villain.
Context & significance
Moll built his reputation on tightly controlled genre pieces, and here he uses the mechanics of a police procedural to ask a broader question about violence against women that the case file alone can't answer. The film's structure, tracking an active case into a stalled one and back again, mirrors how real unsolved investigations actually move: in fits, dead ends, and reopened files rather than a straight line to an arrest.
Watching The Night of the 12th on Ktime
The Night of the 12th streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the investigation either way. A free K-Time account and login unlock the film alongside the rest of the crime and mystery catalogue, presented in a fully Farsi interface built for the diaspora audience.