Maldoror

(Fabrice du Welz, Belgium/France, 2024)

Set in the 1990s, this is a stark, confronting, highly realistic thriller about the law’s attempt to catch and prosecute the members of a gang involved in kidnapping and sex trafficking of young women.

The secret police operation is aptly named Maldoror, after Lautréamont’s 1869 poetic novel about a godless figure who places himself beyond conventional morality.

The film sticks quite closely, in many of its details, to the notorious case of Belgian serial killer and child molester Marc Dutroux (here renamed Marcel Dedieu), now serving life imprisonment. As in the reality, we see the awful effects of a fragmented police force in which each department refuses to cooperate with the others – and general incompetence rules.

There are constant allusions to a possible wider, sinister network involving respected but corrupt citizens in the community. What Fabrice du Welz and co-writer Domenico La Porta have added is an ambiguous hero: Paul (played with admirable intensity by Anthony Bajon), a cop so obsessed with cracking the case that he steps over the line of legality.

Since so much of the story hinges on a stash of VHS tapes, du Welz seizes the opportunity to stylise his visuals with unsettling glitches, pixels and freeze-frames.

© Adrian Martin 1 November 2024