High pressure
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After a suffocating and effective first half, the thriller, where a lost trucker finds himself stuck with a passenger, loses its rhythm.
Vincent is a truck driver. Severe fatigue, drawn features, a family under pressure at the end of the smartphone, which replaced the credit card. He eats up the miles listening to metal, less out of passion than out of necessity, to get moving, to make the machine run, to settle into a rhythm. Coming out of a delivery, despite his initial reluctance, he picks up a hitchhiker. A young black woman, pregnant, smiling and funny, not the type to cause trouble – she even gave him back his lighter when he was about to leave without it. Once in the cab of the truck, the girl gives him her first name: Trente-Sept. And very quickly, everything becomes much, much more complicated. The first half of 37: the shadow and the prey, Arthur Môlard’s first feature film, is not far from being among the best we’ve seen this year in the high-pressure department. Three plans for hanging. Four sequences to immerse you in it up to your chin. At the thirtieth minute, it literally becomes suffocating.
Unfortunately, halfway through, a long scene in a truck stop stops the climb dead in its tracks. The balance between thriller and ordinary drama is broken – caricatured characters, shaky dialogue, we feel that it is starting to fumble. Before taking an extremely risky turn. Unlike the films from which it is inspired (Duel, Hitcher), 37: the shadow and the prey makes the mistake of revealing everything about the origins and motivations of his antagonist, who begins to very v
