‘Death Will Come’: Locarno Review

Dir: Christoph Hochhausler. Ger-Bel-Lux. 2024. 102mins

The spirit of existential French noirs of the fifties and sixties hovers above German director Christoph Hochhausler’s latest slice of genre arthouse. The main difference between this French-language number and the hardboiled crime melodramas of Dassin, Sautet, Melville and company is that they tapped into the malaise of a part of Europe that was going thorough something of an existential post-war crisis itself. Death Will Come, which throws a female hired killer into a messy web of intrigue, has no such contemporary resonance.

An exercise in style

Set in and around an enjoyably dingy Brussels, this is an exercise in style, its only update on the guys and dolls copybook being that most of the guys and dolls are gay and some of the dolls have at least as much agency and thirst for power as the guys. Like Hockhausler’s previous film, 2023 Berlin competition title Till The End Of The Night, Death Will Come – which debuts in Locarno competition – is a foray into the steamy crime genre, and will appeal to those in the mood for an undemanding Euro mood piece. It’s a film with limited theatrical outreach that may benefit from a streaming niche.

It’s not actress Sophie Verbeeck’s fault if we never believe in her character, the rangy, punkish Tez, as a hardened hit person. Maybe that’s the point – after all, Richard Linklater’s recent Hit Man drove home what we already knew, that professional hired killers are potent myths. Death Will Come does at least encourage us, from an early stage, to make our peace with the sheer fictionality of a story that takes a while to settle. A courier is arrested in Luxembourg, and subsequently murdered while serving out his house arrest in a seedy hotel. In a glass and steel penthouse office, glorified pimp Patric De Boer (Marc Limpach) and his cheerfully corrupt attorney and lover Julie (Hilde Van Meghem) try to persuade melancholy crime boss Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) to invest in the next generation of VR sex dolls.

Across town, in a bourgeois apartment bristling with security cameras, Mela, a mysterious blind blonde madame-turned-power-broker played by Delphine Bibet, receives information about De Boer and Mahr from the mistress she has provided for him (and for Julie, it’s hinted). The unhealthy ties of servitude and desire that bind Mela to the girls she employs are mirrored in in Mahr’s relationship with his two assistants, cagey Zinedine (Mourade Zeguendi) and hunky Carlo (Nassim Rachi) – the latter a serviceable plaything who is threatening Zinedine’s role as Mahr’s chief confidant. When Tez finally enters the scene – engaged by Mahr to investigate his courier’s death and punish the killer – we sit back and wait, and wait, for these scattered threads to be woven together.

Dramatic tension is notably lacking in Death Will Come – even the final shootout has its longueurs. Filling in the cracks is pure atmosphere – some of it delegated to Nigji Sanges’ minor-key ambient soundtrack, the rest to lighting, shallow focus, sound design and a range of locations that, while hardly original, are well-chosen. Apart from a brief scene set in the august halls of the Musee Oldmasters Museum, this is a Brussels of underground loading bays, suburban sports fields, abandoned factories and sleazy escort bars.

Scripted by the director with regular writing partner Ulrich Peltzer, the film is at its most compelling when story is suspended – especially in a crimson-lit nightclub scene where Tez hits it off with a waitress under Mela’s watchful, sightless eyes. De Lencquesaing does his best with his world-weary crime boss, but it’s Marc Limpach we want to see more of: his utterly scuzzy De Boer, a cheeky chappie who seems as comfortable inside his depravity as he does inside his big shaggy rug of a fur coat, is the only character that really comes to life amidst the genre cliches.