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Parents' Guide to

The Women and the Murderer

By Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 14+

Women bring down serial killer in intense docu; violence.

Movie NR 2021 92 minutes
The Women and the Murderer Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

  • The Women and the Murderer Movie: Scene # 1
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What's the Story?

THE WOMEN AND THE MURDERER focuses on a few women whose dogged attention helped bring France's first serial killer to justice. Anne Gautier's daughter Helen was raped and murdered in 1995, but the Paris police seemed to be getting nowhere. Gautier, interviewed recently and seen in many clips from the 1990s, launched her own tireless investigation, canvassing neighborhoods, interviewing witnesses, and trying to put the pieces together, all the while pressuring the police to do more to spare other, future families the agony of Gautier's loss. Martine Monteil, one of the only women on France's most elite police team, the Serious Crime Unit, is chief of that storied unit now as she recounts the arduous and frustrating process of finding the killer before he harmed more innocent women. Equally intrigued by the case was reporter Patricia Tourancheau, a co-director on the film. Like Chief Monteil, she toiled in a male-dominated field, working hard to be taken seriously by colleagues and the world. The male-female dynamic plays out further as the murderer nears trial and his male attorney invites a woman to be co-counsel, a calculatedly good look for the defense team of a serial rapist-killer. The plea is "not guilty," despite his detailed confession to police. The low expectations the public had of women in France, even in the 1990s, is a subtopic here, and underscores the brutal attacks that the killer perpetrated solely on female victims. We finally learn that the perp, deemed a "narcissistic psychopath" by psychiatrists, was in and out of French prisons for a variety of assaults against women by the time he began his killing spree in 1991. Despite confessing to the crimes, he pleads innocent at trial. The man is now 58, serving a life sentence. Investigators follow mistaken leads: The police sketch isn't an exact representation of the killer's face. Bloody toe prints at one crime scene are misleading. The epilogue is a remarkable account and moving description of a mother's compassion for the man who killed her daughter.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

The Women and the Murderer is a well-paced procedural that lays emphasis on the role that passionate and smart women played in cracking a case about attacks on women. Co-director Patricia Tourancheau was a journalist who followed this serial killer case as it played out, death by grisly death, in the 1990s in Paris, and her insights and knowledge make this riveting at times. Enlisting two of the opposing attorneys who faced each other in the two-week trial, the filmmakers reenact the trial's most dramatic moment to great effect. The film is so rich with material that any number of tangential issues could easily fill up several more 90-minute documentaries, including the frequent referral to the fact that France had never had a serial killer until that time, but that America has had plenty.

The film also carefully makes the argument against those who feared a DNA database would impinge on their personal privacy, as it was a painstaking file-by-file comparison of randomly collected DNA in police files that led to the killer's capture. Chief Monteil asks if people would rather have dead girls on their consciences than figure out a quick, efficient way to run matches. Had a computerized DNA database existed in the 1990s, the killer could've been caught years earlier, saving several women's lives.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the agony of losing a loved one to violence. Do you think Anne Gautier's involvement in the investigation helped her cope with her grief? If so, how?

  • Women in the workplace are treated badly, according to a policewoman who endured scorn from her male colleagues and a journalist who had similar experiences in her field. Does it seem surprising that they had these experiences in the 1990s? Do you think things have changed for women since then? Why, or why not?

  • A female attorney who lent her "female" approval of the rapist-killer when she represented him at trial later admits she was fooled by her client. How does the movie explain her turnaround? Does the movie suggest that some defendants may not be what they seem?

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