Dance with a Serial Killer

It’s an irresistible premise: a dogged police detective trying to get the goods on a brutal serial killer who’s hiding in plain sight. Dance With a Serial Killer is a true-life policier, like a season-long storyline on Homicide: Life on the Street. How can you go wrong?

The story: a woman is stabbed to death on a busy beach in France. No one hears anything, and there’s nothing in the woman’s life that points to a possible motive. The police zero in on a drifter staying at a nearby homeless shelter, one Francis Heaulme, who admits to having random homicidal urges. But the cops have no evidence to tie him to the crime, and have to let him go. What follows is a two-and-a-half-year cat-and-mouse game between detective Jean-François Abgrall and one of the freakiest, most dangerous homicidal maniacs I’ve ever heard about. Dangerous because there is no pattern, no rhyme or reason to his crimes – just opportunity and a desire to kill.

So, a hero, a villain, and a chase. What more do you need to make a good documentary? Well, actually, a lot. The film simply follows Abgrall around France, interviewing him in the various places where the story unfolded almost 20 years ago: police stations, isolated fields, etc. There are a few interviews with other cops who worked on particular aspects of the case, but that’s it. The filmmakers make virtually no attempt to give us any social or political context. We learn nothing about the justice system that apparently left Abgrall to work on the case virtually alone, nothing about Heaulme beyond the police perspective, and nothing about the French people’s reaction to having a serial killer among them who may have killed more than 40 people.

In other words, the film focuses exclusively on the cat-and-mouse game without telling us anything new about either cats or mice. Abgrall is certainly a great interview and a really smart cop – his explanation of police techniques and the way he pieced the story together are very interesting. But the filmmakers seem to be so enamoured of their detective that they forget about the rest of the story. The lesson of the day? Don't fall in love with your subject so much that you see your story from only one angle.