Almost like a companion piece to Two Prosecutors, Dossier 137 is a procedural of police violence and corruption in modern day Paris that meticulously and effectively breaks down how our systems have failed us.

Led by Léa Drucker, playing Stéphanie, Dossier 137 is a subjective portrait of an internal investigator who comes face to face with the world she's helped protect, even as she claims to uphold accountability. The story begins in 2019, months after the yellow vest riots in Paris, as Stéphanie is approached by a mother of a young man, who claims her son was shot with a riot gun by the police. Permanently disabled, his life ruined, the young man has no one to turn to. It's his word against the entire police force, who have already painted him and his family as criminals.

Stéphanie begins her investigation, and we follow every step of the way. It is long, tiring, and full of dead ends. At no point do we find easy answers, nor do we get a reprieve from the weight that every smothers every waking minute.

This is a film that removes every element of romanticism and science-fiction from the job. Nobody gets to magically enhance a picture that breaks the case wide open. Instead, most of our time is spent in nondescript rooms interviewing people who don't want to talk.

As with war films, there's an inherent risk in depicting the police that even well-meaning critiques become propaganda. These are institutions that are so powerful they assimilate every form of critique. At times, especially in a horrendously clunky moment where Stéphanie's teen son asks her mother why people hate the police, Dossier 137 flirts very close to that edge.

Yet writer and director Dominick Moll smartly pulls away from anything resembling neutrality. This is an angry film that seethes rather than rages. It understands how systemic the issues presented are. To its credit, the film even acknowledges how these abuses are more common against minorities than they are to white suburbanites. The fact it still has to tell a fictional story about a white man to garner enough attention is a problem of its own.

Dossier 137 unravels through extended sequences of frustration. Because of its subjective nature, we have to endure them alongside Stéphanie. Drucker is fantastic in the part, allowing us to get just close enough to feel her anger, yet she remains something of a contradiction in the end. After all, she's still a cop, as she reminds everyone around her. She wants to be part of an institution that protects its own, especially if it means breaking the law to do so.

By the end, it remains unclear if Stéphanie can break out of the system, or if she even wants to. Because that's really the only choice available. The system itself cannot be broken, we can only choose to be part of it or be oppressed by it. By the time that realization sinks in, Moll sends us back into reality, where everything looks even scarier than it did before we walked in.