To Catch a Killer

The Silent Scream of the American Night

There is a specific, chilling frequency to the violence in Damián Szifron’s *To Catch a Killer* that feels less like a traditional thriller and more like a diagnosis of a terminal illness. For his English-language debut, the Argentine director—celebrated for the kinetic, darkly comic explosion of *Wild Tales* (2014)—has stripped away the humor to reveal a stark, brutalist portrait of American decay. This is not merely a police procedural; it is a film about the architecture of dread, where the killer is not just a man, but a symptom of a society that has lost the ability to hear its own screaming.

The film opens with a sequence of terrifying technical precision, arguably one of the most effective introductory scenes in recent genre cinema. On New Year's Eve in Baltimore, amidst the cacophony of fireworks and celebration, a sniper begins to pick off revelers from a high-rise balcony. Szifron orchestrates this massacre not with the chaotic shaky-cam of modern action, but with a detached, god-like perspective. The fireworks mask the gunshots, turning the city’s joy into a grim camouflage for slaughter. It is a masterclass in visual irony: the city celebrates its survival while simultaneously being erased.



Into this void steps Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley), a beat cop whose primary qualification for hunting a monster seems to be her own intimate knowledge of brokenness. Woodley plays Falco with a hushed, internal intensity, a sharp contrast to the typical hard-boiled detective archetype. She is recruited by the FBI’s Geoffrey Lammark, played by Ben Mendelsohn with a scene-chewing brilliance that anchors the film. Mendelsohn’s Lammark is a man exhausted by the stupidity of bureaucracy, fighting a war not just against a killer, but against the optics-obsessed machinery of modern law enforcement.

Visually, Szifron and cinematographer Javier Juliá treat the investigation like a descent into a cold hell. The frame is often dominated by the steel and glass of the city or the oppressive florescence of the war room, creating a suffocating sense of reality. The film is fascinated by the geometry of the hunt—laser lines cutting through the night air to trace bullet trajectories, maps that reduce human lives to data points. It suggests that in the modern world, tragedy is just another logistical problem to be managed, spin-doctored, and filed away.



However, the film’s ambition occasionally outpaces its narrative engine. As the script digs deeper into the killer’s motivation, it veers into a heavy-handed critique of American consumerism, gun culture, and mental health neglect. While the social commentary is earnest, it sometimes lacks the subtlety of the visual storytelling, replacing the unspoken tension with expository dialogue. The film posits that the killer is a "nobody," a ghost created by a system that discards the non-compliant, mirroring Falco’s own fears of irrelevance. The narrative connection between the hunter and the hunted—"hurt people hunt people"—is poignant, though it occasionally feels like a thesis statement rather than an organic character arc.

Yet, even when the script stumbles, the atmosphere remains gripping. The climax, set in a desolate, snow-covered landscape, trades the urban claustrophobia for an existential emptiness. It is here that Szifron’s worldview becomes clearest: the true horror isn't the violence itself, but the silence that follows it.



Ultimately, *To Catch a Killer* stands as a moody, intelligent, if imperfect, entry into the canon of the serial killer thriller. It lacks the nihilistic perfection of Fincher’s *Se7en* or the psychological depth of *The Silence of the Lambs*, but it possesses a unique, mournful energy. Szifron has crafted a film that looks at the American nightmare through the eyes of an outsider, seeing not just the crime, but the tragic, lonely culture that makes such crimes inevitable. It is a film that leaves you not with a pulse-pounding adrenaline rush, but with a cold, lingering chill.