Dominik Moll’s Case 137 is a deceptively complex dramatisation of the 2018 Yellow Vests Protests from the perspective of Stephanie Bertrand, an investigator with the police force played by Lea Drucker, who is charged with looking into a civilian who is severely injured by flash-ball projectiles. The main part of Stephanie’s job is identifying whether the perpetrators are vigilantes, paramilitary or part of the police force and, once she has successfully determined that they are police, figuring out whether they used reasonable or excessive force upon the civilian. As the investigation escalates, Stephanie experiences considerable pushback – from the perpetrators, from her bosses, and from her ex-husband, also a police officer, and his new girlfriend, who as a spokesperson for the police union sees Stephanie’s doggedness as nothing less than a betrayal of everything the force represents.

In outlining this investigation into “deliberate violence by a state-appointed official,” Moll aims for documentary recreation, adopting an aesthetic of facticity to such an extent that the goal seems to be to remove all aesthetic distance. At times the style recalls Errol Morris’ use of talking heads, except that instead of speaking directly to camera, Stephanie and her team are either narrating emails as they sit writing them on computers or proposing facts to colleagues and suspects as they sit across from their desks. Much of the story subsists on data accumulation, most of it revolving around surveillance equipment – mapping the trajectory of the victim and possible perpetrators through the streets of Paris and then, once they have determined the site of the assault, triangulating all the security footage in the surrounding area, while also using the footage to help track down possible eyewitnesses, such as a chambermaid who views the attack from a hotel window. Throughout all these sequences there’s a tacit belief in the veracity of images that extends into Stephanie’s personal life, which Moll introduces by way of a how-to YouTube video that she uses to wash a stray cat that she takes in. Likewise, we first meet her son via footage of a fight he engaged in at his school, footage whose forensic accuracy is beyond question.

Yet lingering alongside this documentary imperative is an emerging scepticism about the visual field. At first it’s a byproduct of the Frederick Wiseman-esque sense of procedure that cloaks the case, a landslide of “endless information, reports and paperwork” that makes watching the film a bit like reading a transcript, especially since much of Stephanie’s procedural work involves transcribing response to questions; if you’re watching it, like I was, with subtitles, it’s a big cognitive load to take it all in. This paves the way for the central “twist” of the film, which is that the perpetrators of the crime, all members of the police force, simply refuse to accept the truth of the images that prove their guilt – and are supported by the police executive in doing so. Moll evokes a new opacity to found footage, and a decline in the epistemology of the image, as these cops seamlessly subjectivise truth by literally asserting that the footage doesn’t depict what it does, or by “reinterpreting” the footage by blithely claiming not to see stuff that’s palpably there. At times it approaches the pinnacle of Doublethink in Part III of George Orwell’s 1984, when O’Brien destroys a piece of paper and tells Winston it never existed: “But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.” “I do not remember it,” said O’Brien.” Things become even more sinister when Stephanie’s boss tells her that her interpretation of the footage (that is, her factual description of its contents) is a failure of empathy, which occludes its true meaning, and threatens to sanction her for her lack of proper emotional atunement.

Like Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Dominik Moll’s film thus glimpses a future where the police state and the fundamental fungibility of the visual field has converged, producing a pervasive yet invisible policing of images. From Case 137’s scrupulous forensic reconstructions of surveillance footage, we shift vertiginously to a world where truth is subjectivized, subjected to doublethink, in what often feels like the next evolution of Michael Haneke’s Hidden, right down to the inner city Parisian streets against which this simulacral drama unfolds. It’s a post-visual film for a post-truth world that leaves Stephanie in a state of radical disorientation with no clear catharsis in sight: “I can’t concentrate anymore, I can’t think anymore, I forget everything, I have migraines, I have become a burden for my mother.” Interestingly, the main form of continuity, the central point of stable truth, is the cat that Stephanie adopts at the start of the film, which Moll often intercuts with pivotal moments in the case, as if to intensify Ethan Zuckerman’s cute cat theory of digital activism, which holds that “low-quality” or ambient online images (such as those of cute cats) are the main point of traction for how the internet distributes truth. By the end of Case 137 nothing exists for sure except for these cute cats and their various avatars, and the cuter they become, the more Stephanie’s world and career melts into air.