A police procedural film has a lot to live up to, and the latest Belgian film from the Venice Film Festival, Maldoror, faces this uphill battle. In this latest police crime drama after two young girls go missing, a young new police recruit, Paul, joins the small unit, Maldoror, tracking a sex offender in hopes of finding the girls. As he learns more, the pressures from other police units and the community begin to impact both Paul and his departments work, losing focus from the task of utmost importance – finding the girls. Despite its captivating historical context, set in 1990’s Belgium at a point of contention between three different police departments, all fearing of a reform that will merge the three into one, Maldoror falters in its execution, feeling much too crammed that effectively halts its pacing, before an ending that punches in the gut, but doesn’t feel earned.

New police recruit, Paul, is invited to join the small new police unit, Maldoror, after two young girls go missing, and his department sets on tracking a sex offender released on probation in hopes of finding the girls. When procedure and own personal interests get in the way of what Paul believes is the right thing to do in putting the lives of the missing girls first, he comes head to head not only with the men he should fear, but also his own department that he once turned to at his lowest point. Becoming a solo vigilante, prioritizing the case over his own personal life, Paul comes head to head with all those involved, who are trying to cover up truths behind the disappearance of the girls, and about those involved themselves.

When Maldoror is good, it is great. The unique look at 1990’s Belgium, and those impacted when three departments could not work together out of fear of a reform that would merge the three departments and result in lost jobs and lesser autonomy. The exploration of how Paul’s own relationships began to crumble as he became obsessed with stopping at nothing to find the girls. The performance from Anthony Bajon as Paul, who encapsulates the slow change from someone who had faith in the system to help those in need, to someone who would play by no rules, convinced at how corrupt and selfish the system truly is. And the brilliant ending, that really hits home hard how much more involved those in charge are willing to become only once they have personal stakes in the story. It captures the pure horrors that transpired in the 1990’s in Belgium because of events like this, succeeding in portraying these actions as nothing less than utterly grotesque and devastating.

Yet despite all of this, and despite the tried and true story of a man stopping at absolutely nothing to save a young one from the clutches of a dangerous group of men, Maldoror unfortunately loses its footing. It is jam packed way too full with information that seems relevant but never really comes to fruition. Side characters, like Paul’s mother, the Santos clan, and most of the other men working with Marcel Dedieu, all play an important role for a fraction of time in the film, but are set up to play much bigger roles, that ultimately all fizzle out, or seem to linger when they were not needed in the first place.

It also does not help that the story seems to be lacking something overall. From the start, we are told that the sex offender, Marcel Dedieu, needs to be watched under suspicion for his involvement with the disappearance of the girls. As this story processes, we simply watch him be surveilled as all of the police inklings about this mans awful involvement come true. Inklings that we, the audience, were told about 12 minutes into the film. So instead of information being slowly revealed to Paul and the audience throughout, we watch as their already revealed predictions are confirmed. This effectively removes a lot of the narrative drive from the film, that boasts a runtime of over 2.5 hours, where we instead switch gears halfway through, now waiting for Paul to snap at the incompetence of the system, simply wanting to save the girls when all other departments have failed to put them first.

Don’t get me wrong, this runtime and the frustrating predicability of the narrative work to align the viewer with Paul, with both becoming overwhelmingly frustrated by the ignorance the departments and the system have towards what Paul has to say that could potentially save the lives of the two young girls. But its odd decision to make reveals in the first act of the film that are normally saved for the end of the second ends up throwing off the pacing, resulting in a film that is a pain more because of its length and predictability than its actual depiction of the broken system. It ramps up by the third act, but by then I already felt like I was watching a completely different film than the one from the first 2 hours.

Maldoror had a lot to live up to in terms of police crime dramas. When it works, it works. But unfortunately, for the most part, the film is quite slow, prioritizing slowly confirming what the audience already knows, rather than slowly revealing new things to the audience. Maybe this is a more accurate depiction of the real world, how often we must go with our gut in cases like these, and highlighting the overall incompetence of a broken system. But for a film of this length, it needed to do a bit more to keep the narrative driving forward in any kind of captivating way.

Maldoror was screened at the 81st Venice Film Festival. Image courtesy of O’Brother – Belgium.