The Girl in the River review – forensic psychologist police procedural thriller plays like noir parody

This small-town police thriller sets its stall out intriguingly, with a murder that seems actively begging to be solved. The perp chose to dump his victim – the 14-year-old daughter of a local political bigwig – into a part of the Mississippi River where she was likely to resurface, and from a highly visible bridge. When veteran detective Alan Kramer (Devon Sawa) and rookie forensic psychologist Amelia Pembrock (Maggie Grace) show up to investigate, they are immediately alerted to a gun in the bushes just yards away. As a colleague observes: “This isn’t a clean-up. It’s a message.”

But Brando Benetton’s debut film sadly fails to capitalise on the misdirection at play in this open-goal crime scene. Instead of using it to pry open community secrets, he gives us a ropey and implausible manhunt. As Kramer and Pembrock race to locate the girl’s twin, who is presumably still in the killer’s clutches, they zero in on local butcher Boris (Darron Dunbar). He has a sex-pest rap sheet and lives with his mother – which apparently ticks all the boxes for a profiling genius such as Pembrock. Kramer pulls her up for being unbothered by the lack of actual prosecutable evidence. But carping is about the only investigative contribution this seasoned criminologist makes here (and what’s a criminologist – a crime sociologist – doing out in the field anyway?).

If the killer leaves behind a parody of a crime scene, The Girl in the River offers up its own parody noir, though in a cliche-strewn and far less careful fashion. We have the obsessive desk jockey, the boozy, trauma-harbouring vet halfway out the retirement door, Tiffany Haddish’s angry black captain (as satirised in the Jump Street franchise), and the affable town coroner (The Karate Kid’s Ralph Macchio). Whenever the detectives are floundering, the over-directed script is always on hand to put them back on the rails. The local media seem strangely willing to share their voluminous stash of damning evidence; a transparently staged mutiny among the townsfolk fires up Kramer and Pembrock just as they’re out of leads.

Grace, with her twitchy defensiveness, and the frazzled Sawa manage to half-ballast this dubious sleuthing, and Benetton keeps the film moving fast enough so the many infelicities don’t register too horrifically. But with no time to accumulate any proper gravitas, Kramer’s capstone speech about universal corruption is, like the victim, dead in the water.