Even kingpins of the seedy underworld dream of an easy-to-manage version of utopia in German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s Brussels-set neo-noir Death Will Come — in this case, a futuristic overhaul of the sex trade in which the introduction of lifelike dolls with warmed skin will mean no more need to deal with the disease and emotional mess that comes with real humans, if those with a financial stake in the status quo will allow a peaceful transition. The long-established Berlin School director brings an edge of cynicism and cold grit to a violent crime drama with more than a few surreal flourishes. But the promise of a thriller of rich ideas about desire, technology, and the body fades, amid a slippery, convoluted plot (scripted by Hochhäusler and Ulrich Peltzer) that frustrates audience investment more than it teases mystery. The story of the high-tech prostitution venture is inelegantly soldered together with a thread about the murder in a Luxembourg hotel of a courier of paintings and dirty cash, who is ambushed after an unknown man posts his bail, making for an over-dense web of mad schemes and duplicity that comes to no neat end. Despite Hochhäusler being a known name, a wide splash may elude this Euro noir oddity.
Tez (Sophie Verbeeck) is the female assassin around which the intrigue of twists and various shady gaggles of eccentric ganglords and their connections turn. Bob-haired with a piercing gaze that brooks no nonsense, hers is a fearless presence that can both intimidate power players and disarm and seduce women behind bars, and she has a professional reputation among the kind of people who need hired gun services as one of the best in the game. Tez has been hired by notorious gangster Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) to find and take revenge on whoever killed his courier, the death of a black hire (who was lured by the job’s lucrative potential) dismissively written off as an “African affair” by the police. When it gets out that Mahr believes he does not have long left to live himself, more intrigue is added to his hazy motives for wanting Tez on the case, and another layer to the film’s vague themes of utility, fate and mortality, as a black Mercedes starts tailing her. Verbeeck’s vivid presence cannot fully compensate for a lack of backstory to Tez’s character. She can never clock off as an assassin, and her first reflex on waking in the night is to reach for her weapon — a solitary, mechanical existence in a rainstreaked European city we encounter as big on noir mood, but depthless.
As with his previous noir, Till the End of the Night, which bagged a Silver Bear at the 2023 Berlinale for Thea Ehre’s performance as a trans woman on parole roped into assisting a gay undercover agent infiltrate a drug organisation, Hochhäusler breaks with the macho codes of more conventional thrillers for a take on power that is shifting and hard to pin down. Inside a red-lit club, in a scene where playfulness thinly veils authentic longing, Tez describes the clientele to a woman whose eyes are clouded by a disease, before approaching a bartender made up with tear-like glitter. In another surreal configuration, De Boer (Marc Limpach), derobed of his signature fur coat that plants him within the irreverent tradition of Fassbinder’s flamboyant rogues, lies asleep in bed beside his hard-as-nails partner in business and love Julie (Hilde Van Mieghem), with a humanoid beauty wedged between them. Scenes like this are too few, as the film’s oblique and tough veneer stops us at a distance, and keeps us from feeling much of a heartbeat. We’re snapped back to more standard chase-and-shoot sequences before ample hints of delirious weirdness have time to develop and transport us anywhere truly transgressive.
Director: Christoph Hochhäusler
Screenwriter: Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Peltzer
Editing: Stefan Stabenow
Cast: Sophie Verbeeck, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Marc Limpach, Mourade Zeguendi, Hilde Van Mieghem
Producer: Bettina Brokemper
Cinematographer: Reinhold Vorschneider
Production companies: Heimatfilm (Germany), Amour Fou Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Tarantula Belgique (Belgium)
Sales: True Colours
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internazionale)
In French
101 minutes
