Coups de sang (2021)

Twenty-year-old Justine Delgado is found murdered on the shores of Lake Thurins, while Ryan Kowalsky, regarded as her boyfriend, is arrested, dazed, at a nearby railway station. Justine’s father, François Delgado, a police officer in Lyon, hears the news while on an assignment to persuade his mother to end her activism on behalf of the homeless. François has long disliked Ryan, Justine’s childhood friend, and immediately sees him as the culprit. His mother is convinced that Ryan, the son of her best friend, is not the killer. Each looks for information to support their convictions. Although removed from the investigation, François follows the police inquiry with information his colleague Serge Lantier discreetly passes to him. François also relies on his former boss at the SRPJ, Bernard Duquesne, but soon realizes that Duquesne is instead trying to hush up the case, which threatens his security-guard business with Fauconnier, one of the town’s prominent figures. Meanwhile, Mireille, Justine’s mother, hires a lawyer to defend Ryan and meets Justine’s friends and roommates. Justine’s father and grandmother are stunned to discover that she had been seeing Fauconnier’s son and his little circle of bourgeois friends, and taking part in their sex parties. Justine was eight weeks pregnant, but DNA testing clears the two young men under suspicion, Ryan and Aymeric. François and his mother then lose all certainty about who the presumed culprit is, while the motive for the crime remains elusive. Ryan tells the police that he took part in the parties as a DJ so he could stay close to Justine and protect her, because he loved her. He confesses to the crime, but the police do not believe him and force him to admit that Aymeric had amused himself by raping him in front of his friends and Justine. Justine had urged him to file a complaint, but he had refused. Justine’s grandmother then understands why Justine, whom she had not seen for years, wanted to meet her—and the grave consequences of that missed appointment. Beside himself with rage, François gets Aymeric to confess by threatening him with a gun to his temple. Among other things, Aymeric reveals that Serge Lantier, who had seemed like a nice colleague until then, was doing extra work for Duquesne’s company, “keeping order” at Fauconnier’s son’s parties, and sleeping with Justine. He had gotten her pregnant. Justine was blackmailing him, wanting to get something from him so she could leave far away. If the information had been made public, it would have harmed his entire professional and married life. Serge Lantier then admits that he plotted Justine’s murder, giving the investigation an ideal suspect in the person of Ryan. At the end of this ordeal, François and his mother come to understand one another.