Dossier 137 lands as a procedural on France's flash-ball wounds

By Daniel Okafor

"Dossier 137," a procedural on flash-ball violence during France's 2018 gilets-jaunes protests, reaches UK cinemas this month. The Guardian filed its review on May 15.

Director Dominik Moll builds the picture as a taut, charged procedural on a conflicted officer investigating violence against a teenage protester. He carries docu-dramatic reflexes (the documentary-realist grammar) into a fictional case file.

What's the case?

Léa Drucker plays Stéphanie, an officer in the IGPN (the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale, France's Internal Affairs bureau). She investigates horrific head injuries suffered by a teenage protester. Only an LBD round could have caused them.

The lanceur de balle de défense ("defence-ball launcher") fires rubber bullets at punishing velocity. French police used the weapon against gilets-jaunes demonstrators in 2018 with near-fatal results, as contemporaneous press investigations established beyond serious dispute.

Why does the marriage matter?

Stéphanie is divorced from Jérémy (Stanislas Merhar), a serving officer. His new girlfriend also wears the badge. Both resent Stéphanie's bureau as disloyal, undermining colleagues forced to cut corners to keep France safe in the post-Bataclan era. The November 2015 Paris attacks remain a national reference point.

The "cut corners" line carries more moral weight than any courtroom speech the film might have staged. Moll splits the policing divide along a marriage bed, not a manifesto.

How does Moll keep his camera off the streets?

He parks it indoors. Offices, interrogation rooms, Stéphanie's flat. The street protests, the smashed roundabouts, the burning barricades — all absent. Drucker's face, set more than speaking, does the ethical heavy lifting.

The film wants to function as evidence. Moll lets the procedural argue. Drucker registers the bureaucratic dread of a woman who knows precisely what the file contains long before she opens it.

What verdict did the review reach?

The Guardian called the picture "serious, focused, if slightly programmatic," with "docu-dramatic storytelling reflexes and a determined procedural tread." The verdict reads as commendation with a small footnote. Slightly programmatic is fair, measured against the filmmaker's evident care rather than any indifference on display.

So what?

"Dossier 137" enters a thin French cycle on police accountability — films that file rather than declaim. Its restraint, more than its talking points, will shape the film's afterlife at festivals and on home-viewing shelves through the year ahead.