The rest of the film is a relentless, 119-minute manhunt. The killer, later identified as a disillusioned structural engineer named Richard (an unsettling Jovan Adepo), is not a genius. He is not a Joker-esque anarchist. He is a lonely, angry white man with a military surplus rifle, a manifesto on a flash drive, and a profound hatred for a society that he believes erased him. The film’s title, To Catch a Killer , is ironic: catching him is the easy part. Understanding him is impossible, and stopping the next one is a fool’s errand.
From a high-rise apartment across the city, an unseen shooter opens fire on a holiday celebration. Twenty-nine people are killed in minutes. The massacre is not chaotic; it is calculated. The shooter uses a modified rifle, staggered reloads, and escape routes that stall every first responder.
This is Szifron’s genius. He came from Argentine television and the anthology Wild Tales , where he mastered the art of escalating chaos. In To Catch a Killer , he reverses that: he masters the art of controlled, bureaucratic dread.
The film also critiques the true-crime industrial complex. In one scene, a news producer tries to buy the killer’s manifesto. In another, Eleanor watches a YouTube video essayist romanticize Richard as a “dark genius.” She turns it off in disgust. The film’s message is clear: the act of “catching” a killer is already a form of entertainment, and that entertainment begets more killers.
: Originally titled Misanthrope , the movie delves into the killer’s deep-seated hatred for modern society and how both he and Eleanor are shaped by their respective past traumas.
Woodley delivers a career-best performance that was largely ignored by awards bodies. Her Eleanor is not the “brilliant but troubled” cliché. She is genuinely broken—her hands shake during stakeouts, she snorts crushed painkillers in gas station bathrooms, and she has no witty one-liners. When she confronts the killer in the film’s final act, she doesn’t give a speech. She simply says, “You’re not special.” That line is the film’s thesis. In an era of true crime fetishization, To Catch a Killer insists that mass shooters are pathetically mundane.
For film historians, the double-year designation is rare. It implies a film that was conceived, released, and culturally concluded within a single calendar year. To Catch a Killer did not have a festival run in 2022 (it skipped TIFF and Cannes). It did not receive awards re-releases in 2024. It belongs entirely to the spring and summer of 2023—a moment when America was asking itself hard questions about violence, and the film industry answered with a shrug.
: The film explores how bureaucracy, political optics, and inter-agency ego often hinder justice, sometimes resulting in innocent lives being lost during the pursuit.
(Ralph Ineson), a misanthropic man living off the grid who is deeply repulsed by modern society and surveillance. Key Themes: Reviewers from The Guardian The Austin Chronicle
On New Year's Eve in Baltimore, a high-precision sniper kills 29 people at random. FBI investigator Geoffrey Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn) notices rookie cop Eleanor Falco
Then, the city explodes.
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