To Catch a Killer

I saw the trailer for To Catch a Killer (fka Misanthrope) on, of all places, Instagram the day before. With an extra day and not much to do, I coughed up the RM20 to watch this (cos there's no morning screenings), mostly to get out of the heatwave. 

Because this isn't a blockbuster movie (per se), of course it was gonna be in Hall 5 of the second home GSC. It's so underpromoted, I didn't even know this movie existed until yesterday. Because it was still a public holiday, I would say the hall is about 1/3 filled? 

Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley) is a young and talented but troubled police officer of the Baltimore PD wrestling with the demons of her past when she is recruited by Geoffrey Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn), the FBI's chief investigator, to help profile and track down a serial killer. As the police and FBI launch a nationwide manhunt, they are thwarted at every turn by the killer's unprecedented behavior. Given her tortured psyche, Eleanor may be the only person who can understand the mind of their assailant and bring him to justice.

• I laughed so hard at how she, a beat cop, gets to be the police liaison in a huge case like this cos her psyche is almost like the UnSub's, when padahal she probably also can't even pass the background/psych eval for the police department.
• It's almost a nice surprise when it turns out Ben Mendelsohn's character was gay with the husband reveal. As if the 3 piece suit wasn't enough of a tell?
• You can hear the non-American's American accent sounding kinda same same. 

If you watch a lot of procedurals, some of the beats are kinda familiar. 

This movie feels more like a streaming platform movie, AND a paycheque movie for everyone involved. My theory why it's on a big screen at all is because it's the director's first English language movie, and Shailene Woodley is a producer?

This movie is so small, there's no blow by blow spoilers, so I had to watch it anyway to find out what happened at the end. 

If you're kinda tired of long movies, you might be glad to know that this movie just barely scraped the 2 hour mark, but even then it still felt a little too long. In TV show terms, this would be a 2 parter, or a brief arc of a season.