The term “rip-off” isn’t bad when it comes to the replication of recent hits. There have been few crime epics released since The Godfather that didn’t in some way pay tribute to Francis Ford Coppola, and nearly every action film of the 1990s was molded off of the success of Die Hard. If anything, it's the lazy attempts made by filmmakers to relate their work to an entirely different set of inspirations that’s more harmful; as much as Marvel Studios wanted to convince audiences that Captain America: Brave New World was really a 1970s political thriller, it didn’t take a cinephile to notice that a film that featured a “Red Hulk” had nothing to do with Three Days of the Condor or All The President’s Men.
The psychological thriller To Catch a Killer is a reimagining of the serial killer crime epics that were popular in the 1990s. Although it was a subgenre that crossed over with slasher cinema (Scream), dark comedy (Funny Games), character studies (The Talented Mr. Ripley), and social satires (Natural Born Killers), the vast majority of these films were indebted to Jonathan Demme’s Best Picture winning adaptation of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher’s breakthrough second feature Se7en. These genres have been largely defunct in the past decade due to their popularity on television; the world of Hannibal Lector continued with the excellent NBC drama Hannibal, and Fincher crafted another true crime saga with the two seasons of Netflix’s Mindhunter.
At the center of To Catch A Killer is Shailene Woodley, whose character Eleanor Falco is an homage to Clarice Starling. However, there’s enough to prevent To Catch A Killer from being too familiar, as Eleanor isn’t gifted with the same respect that came with Starling’s advanced position within the FBI trainee program. A overworked beat cop with the unenviable responsibility of communal patrol on New Year’s Eve, Eleanor’s only brought into the search for a rogue sniper by circumstances that’re beyond her control. After the collection of clues that hint to the killer’s potential motivations, Eleanor’s allowed to participate in the investigation led by FBI Special Agent Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn).
The premise of To Catch A Killer is so self-explanatory that the film has the opportunity to provide more interiority to its characters. Although there isn’t a specific diagnosis that’s identified, it’s evident that there’s something off about Eleanor; her extra-periphery sensitivity may have made her skilled at the identification of latent clues, but it’s also limited her capacity for social interaction outside of the workplace. This is rarely called out in a direct way, as To Catch A Killer moves at too quick to beg the audience to have sympathy for Eleanor. However, Woodley’s consistent enough with her performance that any sudden breakthroughs made by Eleanor don’t feel completely unearned.
Woodley’s an actress who was a victim of the career stagnation that has thwarted many rising stars. Following her terrific work in the A24 coming-of-age film The Spectacular Now and Alexander Payne’s dramedy The Descendants, Woodley was saddled with a lead role in the young adult franchise The Divergent Saga, a series so terrible that its planned final installment was never completed. Although Woodley made an attempt to work with auteurs, a thankless role in Ferrari and a showy performance in the Greg Araki misfire White Bird In A Blizzard didn't do much to make her commercially viable. To Catch A Killer is a significant shift away from the issue-based dramas that Woodley’s appeared in recently, such as The Fallout and The Mauritanian, but the fact that she’s also the film’s producer is an indication that it was a conscious choice to shake up her image.
Whether Woodley’s believable as an underappreciated Baltimore cop is superfluous, as To Catch A Killer is more interested in sustained thrills than reality. The advantage of making a modern serial killer thriller is that To Catch A Killer is able to use technological advances that weren’t possible in the 1990s; the inventive use of assembled cell phone footage, research into online fringe communities, and conversations about mental health signify that To Catch A Killer wasn’t just a script that sat on the shelf for three decades. Although it takes time to note the collateral damage, the increased body count is used to put more pressure on Eleanor to solve the case.
The most fascinating modernization technique in To Catch A Killer is the notion of departmental disputes, as both the Baltimore Police Force and FBI vie for control. These conflicts between investigators weren’t uncommon in 1990s thrillers, but they served as another barrier for the protagonists to face, and not a piece of legitimate infrastructural criticism. As pulpy as it is, To Catch A Killer has some probing insights on why the division of obligations between different authorities has allowed vigilante killers to become more prominent. It's a film that avoids the lionization of institutions because both of its protagonists are outsiders; Eleanor’s a social outcast among the cops, and Lammark’s refusal to appease his superiors has limited his capacity for promotion.
Dumped in its theatrical release, To Catch A Killer made a resurgence when it unexpectedly rose to the top of Netflix’s streaming charts. It’s a suitable fate for a film that’s indebted to the 1990s thrillers that had a second life thanks to relentless reruns on TNT and FX. The backlash against the film for its conventionality is a sign that nostalgia for the “serial killer era” of populist cinema has led to a rose-tinted perspective on how good these movies actually were; To Catch A Killer isn’t Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs, but it’s a lot better than Freeway or The Bone Collector.