Maldoror (2024) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: every time the missing girls are missing
Take a Drink: for every absolute creep
Take a Drink: for every lead
Do a Shot: every time a superior quashes that lead
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
I watched Cure for the first time earlier this year, a story of an investigator maddened by a serial killing case he cannot crack over years of trying. Bong Joon-ho cited it as a big influence on his masterpiece Memories of Murder, which covered a similar story in its inimitable way.
Maldoror will need some years of retrospective consideration before being mentioned in the same breath as those two, but it’s undoubtedly a spiritual sibling. It follows a young Belgian gendarme who swears to find two kidnapped young girls, and then lets nothing, not even the eventual understandable resistance of the then-new wife he swore that to, get in the way of his pursuit.
A Toast
This story is purportedly based on a true one, one I hope isn’t too much so. It’s just the brutality of the crimes, which are indeed senselessly so, but also the way their destruction radiated outwards and consumed the still-living, like the impossibly boyish (the mustache doesn’t help) protagonist played by Anthony Bajon and to a lesser degree his partner played by Alexis Manenti (in his second prominent role at this festival among many previous at others).
As they pursue leads, they are inhibited at every turn, not by criminals and their accomplices, but by their erstwhile peers. At first, it’s the fact they’re one of three separate police forces in the Nation, none playing ball with each other, but then it becomes bureaucracy even within their own, and the inevitable CYA attitude that is perhaps its only true product.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though, especially at the beginning, exhibiting a surprising sense of humor (especially a just spectacular wig game). Of course, that progressively cedes territory to ennui and obsession. It’s a film that’s heavy on suspense but light on action, except one well-shot and staged home invasion shoot-out and an ending that is as grey and snarled as the rest.
Beer Two
Our protagonist absolutely does himself no favors, with his chief, with his wife, eventually seemingly with everyone. While very smart, there are many scenes in which he could have played things much smarter. Obsessions makes fools of us all, I suppose.
Verdict
Maldoror is a haunting and devilishly unsatisfying story of crime and never, impossibly-proportional punishment.
