“I think we are expected to learn something about living by the sword and accepting that you’ll die by it, but I needed more convincing.”

Death Will Come is a French-language thriller starring Franco-Belgian actress Sophie Verbeeck and veteran French actor Louis-Do de Lencquesaing. The film follows a female assassin hired by a powerful gangster to avenge the murder of one of his couriers, only to become the target herself. Though hired as an assassin, much of the narrative revolves around her investigation and really falls into the mould of classic noir gumshoe thriller.

Director Christoph Hochhäusler, whose previous work Till the End of the Night premiered at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival, helms this Germany-Luxembourg-Belgium co-production. The two films have something of the same device – the role of somebody investigating the darker underbelly of European life (in Till the End of the Night the main character explores the world of drug dealing – within the lens of an exploration of a trans relationship). And Death Will Come is certainly murky; we are introduced to an ouroboros-like network of villains scheming against each other in absolute circles, and the more we know about them and their pathological infighting, the more we realise that life is of no great importance to them – winning, staying wealthy, and staying on top is all that matters.

The film is informed by both European and American cinematic heritages. It feels French at times, American at others (certainly the inclusion of an assassin as a main character is a very American trope), but perhaps the best comparison goes all the way back to British film The Long Good Friday (1980): the constant threat, the ennui of the successful gangster character, the sense that every moment of peace is fragile.

Some of the writing is good but is also so dependent on an American understanding of cinematic gangster universes that it doesn’t tell us very much about real crime in Europe. I noted particularly that one of the central mysteries to be solved by our protagonist is who posted bail for the courier before he was murdered. A classic American storyline. But the courier was arrested in Luxembourg, and like the whole of Western Europe Luxembourg doesn’t have a bail posting (assurance) system – that exists in America, not in Europe. I couldn’t decide if this worked or not. Perhaps it’s okay for a film to create fabricated situations for dramatic effect, but then is this true for films that want to present us with gritty realism? Does it materially change the film? No, but it tells us that the writing is more concerned with following American noir tropes than exploring something true or novel about European crime. It tells us that this is a style of storytelling that sits firmly in a filmic universe, not a verité universe, despite its gritty portrayals.

There are two great pleasures in the film. Firstly, Sophie Verbeeck does well as the assassin Tez, the strong and perhaps semi-moral heart of a film in which all other characters are so unlikeable. She bears a strong resemblance to Lena Headey and makes for a striking lead. A late action sequence involving a shootout in an abandoned industrial unit is the high point of the film, and she copes well with the physicality of it (the whole scene is also well-directed).

Secondly, there is a head-spinning complexity of who is working for whom, and who is following whom and who is reporting to whom. It’s fun to see how all the crime lords (for want of a better term) keep tabs on each other and how many people are being followed so that in the end you really get the sense that they are all one big pseudo-family unit, unable to simply talk to each other, thriving by keeping constant secret (or not so secret) surveillance on each other’s dealings. It’s a good device, though by necessity reductive, as this is really a chamber piece with only about six key characters; there is reference to ‘the Italians’ for instance, but we never see them.

The cinematography seems to be purposely unfussy; France and Luxembourg look bleak and cold. We see a lot of shots from car windscreens as they move dully through streets. The mise en scene is simple and Dogme 95-like for the most part. There is, however, a difference between what we see during the day and at night. Shots in late-night bars have an ephemeral glitter to them – they are attractive and suggest a certain metaphysical quality to the film not echoed elsewhere. I’m not wholly sure what to make of the contrast; a scene where Tez seduces a barmaid feels like it’s from a different film.

A central component of the film is the health and mental state of Louis-Do de Lencquesaing’s crime lord character Mahr. If Tez is the centre of the film, he is everything else: the big boss, all roads lead to him. We see him making amends for mistakes made, indeed employing Tez is part of that amends-making, but I’m not wholly sure it works. I don’t think I felt anything for his plight or position; the scenes with his former wife are, I assume, intended to be humanising but I felt a shrug even if they are well-acted. And this is probably the greatest fault of the film; when the courier was killed, I could barely register a care (we hadn’t seen him), but then this was made a key plot point. When others died, I was left equally cold. It’s a very hard balance to portray characters who themselves have so little grip on the value of life, but then in the short runtime of a film to hope we can care enough to find out who killed whom and why. Perhaps this story would be better suited to a miniseries, where we can bond with characters and come to grips with their plight. Instead we get a quick trawl through murky waters that tries for a swift resolution in the last ten minutes. I think we are expected to learn something about living by the sword and accepting that you’ll die by it, but I needed more convincing.

Death Will Come is worth seeking out and watching. I’d watch Sophie Veerbeeck’s Tez again (I could see her as the central character of a TV show, or at least one more film), and there is a good, gripping action sequence. Watch it because you enjoy strong female characters, or gangster films in general, but perhaps don’t watch it if you are looking for something unique, something with a meaningful message about European crime, or with stakes you can really care about.