Precinct of Rain Has the Look and Misplaces the Reason

Precinct of Rain is a beautiful film that does not know what it is sad about, and after two viewings I am confident that is a fatal condition rather than a mysterious one. Vaugine has clearly studied the canon. Every surface is correct: the venetian-blind shadows, the trench coats gone dark at the shoulders, the rain-glazed precinct windows behind every interrogation. If you paused it at random you would swear you were watching a classic. It is only in motion that the hollowness shows.

The surfaces are immaculate

Credit where due. This is one of the best-looking noirs in years. The production design is meticulous and the rain, again always the rain, is handsomely built — Vaugine and her team clearly love the genre's weather and lavish attention on it. There is a rooftop chase in the third act, shot almost entirely in reflection off standing water, that is as pure a piece of noir craft as anything in this paper's recent memory.

The reason is missing

But noir was never about the coats. Underneath the style, the great examples run on a specific ache: the sense that the system is rotten, that the detective is compromised, that solving the case will fix nothing. Precinct of Rain has all the iconography of that despair and none of its content. Its cops are corrupt in the way a mood board is corrupt — decoratively, without cost. The case resolves cleanly. The compromised hero is compromised only until the plot needs him not to be. The film mistakes the symptoms of noir for its disease.

Three marks, and they are honest ones. What is on screen is genuinely accomplished, and a lesser critic could ride the surfaces to a rave. But a picture this fluent in the language should have something to say in it. Vaugine can plainly make a noir. Next time I hope she makes one that hurts.