In Vincent Garenq’s engaging docudrama, the true-crime procedural “In Her Name” (Au nom de ma fille), veteran French actor Daniel Auteuil plays a father, an accountant, who expends three decades hoping to capture the murderer of his fourteen-year-old daughter. Auteuil is matched against Sebastian Koch (“The Lives of Others”) as the stepfather, a doctor he suspects of killing young Kalinka Bamberski. With fleet features and darting eyes, Auteuil always excels at indicating fear, at capturing the quicksilver of thought. He applies those skills to wide-ranging use as events, and years, flicker past, remaining superficially calm as events, and legalities, in both Germany and France, grow stranger and ever more infuriating. 105m. (Ray Pride)
“In Her Name” opens Friday, December 23 at Facets.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
