Death Will Come, German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s latest feature (and first French-language production), follows a contract killer, Tez (Sophie Veerbeck), who is hired by an aging crime lord, Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), to find and dispatch the persons responsible for killing one of his couriers. Per the director’s own description, it’s probably his “purest genre work” — and this assessment stands to reason. Portentous title aside, it subverts neither the expected tone nor the basic plot mechanics of its crime thriller setup. We open with a mystery about who killed the courier, and why; and we end with the mystery resolved. But in another sense, a “pure” genre production in the manner of the American B-movies of the classic Hollywood era is simply not possible today: for the medium having built up a history in the decades since, a certain level of genre awareness is inescapable. For Hochhäusler, as for the Godard of Breathless (1960), the question is not whether to transform genre, but only how one might do so.
In Death Will Come, Hochhäusler’s main task is to heighten not just our awareness of the characters’ impending mortality, but also the way in which their acceptance of their mortality changes the genre calculus involved in parsing any given sequence. Much of the film plays out as a series of cryptic conversations in dimly lit rooms, where we are asked to sort out the motivations of the various characters, as well as their relations to each other. And as with most films of this sort, the central tension is one of knowledge: the difference between a crime lord such as Mahr and his inferiors is not a matter of physical power, but of his greater grasp of the total situation in which their actions are embedded. In Death Will Come, the “twist” is that the key piece of knowledge does not directly involve the machinations of the murder, but rather has to do with how various characters respond to the impending death of a key figure. The genre template we have been led to expect from many a crime film involves sorting out the goals of each involved party. The difference here is how a character’s response to, and complete acceptance of, death can (potentially) short-circuit the usual genre mechanics. The result is a plot that finally circles back in on itself like an ouroboros.
What Death Will Come offers us, then, is not a crime film or murder mystery, but a sort of Wellesian enigma — think Citizen Kane (1941) or, better, Mr. Arkadin (1955) — where the enduring fascination of the film lies in how the actions of its central characters cannot be reduced to any governing, goal-oriented situation. And what the film lacks in interest from moment to moment, it tries to make up for in a closing structural flourish that recalls Michel Deville’s little-seen Death in a French Garden (1985), where we realize that we have been watching something like an elaborately staged suicide all along. If the film does not quite live up to that comparison, though, it is because this final revelation does not appreciably reverberate back through the rest of the runtime. With The City Below (2010), Hochhäusler managed a structural coup of this sort, offering a final minute that radically reframes the rest of the film. With Death Will Come, he offers something a touch more staid: a movie that attempts to recast the fatalism of the crime genre, but falls short of being transformative.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 1.
