Here is a fictionalised true crime drama, but one that is more stately and sedate than the garish procedural brutality of regular true crime. There is one gruesome crime-scene photo, but otherwise this could really have been based on something by Ruth Rendell. It is co-written and directed by its star Daniel Auteuil and the original French title is Le Fil (The Thread), after an incriminating thread of material found on the corpse – or perhaps it means the thread of logic behind a legal argument, the loose thread which, if pulled sufficiently, might cause the whole thing to collapse.
The action is based on a case recounted by Jean-Yves Moyart, a criminal defence lawyer, who blogged under the name “Maître Mô” and who died in 2021. Grégory Gadebois plays Nicolas Milik (“Ahmed” in Moyart’s blog), a devoted, careworn husband to his alcoholic wife Cécile and caring dad to five children. When Milik is accused of murdering his wife, with a local bar owner apparently an accomplice, principled lawyer Maître Monier (Auteuil) takes the case; passionately convinced of his client’s innocence but finding himself in an increasingly tense situation.
An Ordinary Case is, mostly, a rather low-key movie whose incidental details of obsession and crime are oddly underplayed; the same goes for Auteuil’s rather detached performance, gliding through scenes in court and at home with his partner and fellow lawyer Maître Annie Debret (Sidse Babett Knudsen). Yet the film snaps into shape after the verdict in the final act and a tense conversation between Monier and Milik has a force that lends a retrospective charge to what has gone before; their final conversation raises the stakes yet further.
This is not exactly a drama of ambiguity, like Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall: it is more old-fashioned than that. Perhaps Auteuil needed to give it more energy on both sides of the camera, yet there is a charge in its deferred revelation.
• An Ordinary Case is on digital platforms from 7 July.
