Sambre: Anatomy of a Crime review – the misogyny of the French police will make you want to scream

The local police station is established as being inept and parochial from the outset. Borrowing a familiar detective drama trope, we enter through the eyes of a new starter at the station, Jean-Pierre Blanchot (Julien Frison), who has returned home to the north from the bright lights of the outskirts of Paris. The youthful Blanchot finds old-school officers who are stuck in their ways, fuelled by anti-immigrant biases and a desire to do as little as possible. They use one single notebook to log every case, in order to keep paperwork to a minimum. After Christine reports the attack to Breton, he downgrades it to “attempted robbery with assault” and asks her if she still wants to file a complaint. The blood on her face has barely dried.