128 min | R | January 29, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A burned-out deputy and a rising detective hunt a serial killer through 1990 Los Angeles. The case is a pretext. The movie is really about the things that get inside a cop and never wash out.
Joe Deacon is a Kern County deputy with a wrecked marriage and a past he left behind in Los Angeles. A routine errand sends him back to the city, where a string of murders pulls him into an active investigation. Jim Baxter is the young detective running the case and the department’s rising star. Deke attaches himself to the hunt, and the two men circle a suspect named Albert Sparma. The killings are the engine. The real subject is the rot that police work leaves in the men who do it well.
Denzel Washington plays Deke with a stillness that reads as exhaustion rather than calm. He carries the case like a debt, and Washington lets the guilt show in the way the character avoids looking at the bodies. Rami Malek plays Baxter as a clean, ambitious man who does not yet know he is walking into the same trap. Malek keeps his face tight and controlled, which makes the cracks land harder when they finally come. Jared Leto plays Sparma with greasy patience, a soft paunch, and a smile that all but dares the detectives to suspect him. He turns interrogation into a game he enjoys, and the performance makes the suspect more interesting than the plot around him.
John Lee Hancock writes and directs from a script he first drafted decades earlier, and the age shows in the choices. He sets the story in 1990, before DNA testing turns detective work into a lab procedure. That choice forces the men to rely on instinct, hunches, and the small physical details the title names. The film favors dim interiors, fluorescent morgues, and long stretches of two men talking in parked cars at night. The pace is deliberate and the camera lingers, which builds dread early and drag later. The period texture is convincing, but the construction borrows its mood from better films about the same obsession.
The film wants to be a study of obsession in the tradition of its grimmer predecessors. It assembles the cast and the atmosphere for that movie and then refuses to commit to it. The ending withholds resolution and treats ambiguity as a substitute for meaning. The gesture reads as evasion rather than depth, a way to dodge the question the story spends its whole length asking. Three actors of real weight do serious work here. They are stranded inside a script that mistakes vagueness for moral complexity.