Death Will Come (La Mort viendra) | 2024 Locarno Film Festival Review

And Bear Your Eyes: Hochhäusler’s Grim Sketch of a Tangled Underworld

Death, it seems, does not quite become Christoph Hochhäusler, the Berlin School alum making his French language debut with the enigmatically titled La Mort viendra (Death Will Come). His foray into French language, a country which first lavished considerable acclaim upon the wave of Berlin School directors who cropped up in the late 1990s German cinema scene (such as Christian Petzold and Angela Schanelec), feels like something of a logical full circle moment for Hochhäusler in particular, who spent years trying to make an Isabelle Huppert headlined WWII drama I’ve Seen You Smile. Employing a moody synth score atop a lethargically paced elliptical narrative speckled with a vast array of thinly drawn superficial characters, the film’s slow burn never feels more than lukewarm despite the navigation of a striking female assassin played by Sophie Verbeek.

A courier named Yann (Pitcho Womba Konga) is arrested entering Luxembourg smuggling drug money hidden in expensive art. It turns out he works for troubled Brussels crime boss Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), who’s having a bit of a cash flow problem. The bust seemingly makes Mahr vulnerable to some criminal competitors, including sinister Patric De Boer (Marc Limpach) and his lover/lawyer Julie (Hilda Van Meghem). These two are sharing a woman lover who is actually employed to spy on them by Mela (Delphine Bibet), who used to work for Mahr but is now a blind but powerful brothel madam whose fingers seem to be stirring multiple pots. When Yann is murdered in his hotel room, Mahr hires Tez (Verbeek), an assassin charged with locating and killing the perpetrator. As Tez investigates, she’s also being tailed by one of Mahr’s additional associates to monitor her progress before she gets too close to the truth.

There’s much in common here with Hochhäusler’s previous film, 2023’s Till the End of the Night (read review), in which an undercover investigator infiltrates a drug dealer’s realm through his association with a mysterious trans woman. What benefits Death Will Come, by comparison, is the director’s reunion with scribe Ulrich Peltzer, for at least there’s a return to sense of characterization and serviceable dialogue. But it would appear both writer and director seem to have grown somewhat bored by the mechanical inevitabilities of their narrative, which doesn’t so much twist and turn but run around in circles to end in the same place it started. Where the film takes on some more exceptional energies are through the short asides featuring Tez outside of her mission.

DP Reinhold Vorschneider steals the show with the film’s best moment, which feels like a sapphic homage to Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle (1982) when Tez, urged by the blind but obnoxiously wise Mela to pursue the beautiful bartender who has snagged her attention. It’s these fleeting moments which suggest a much more interesting scenario lies buried beneath the endless charade of criminal underbelly tropes, with Verbeek bringing a Lena Headey energy deserving of more exploration. It’s only the throwaway peripheral moments which stand out, like the bizarre but intriguing VR sex doll enterprise De Boer is trying to finance in the film’s early moments. Inevitably, death does indeed come for some of the main players, but its finality barely registers.

Reviewed on August 9th 2024 at the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival – Concorso Internazionale section. 101 Mins

★★½/☆☆☆☆☆