Murder by Numbers
Richard and Justin, the high school killers in “Murder by Numbers,” may not have heard of Leopold and Loeb, or seen Hitchcock’s “Rope,” or studied any of the other fictional versions (“Compulsion,” “Swoon”) of the infamous murder pact between two brainy and amoral young men. But they’re channeling it. “Murder by Numbers” crosses Leopold/Loeb with a police procedural and adds an interesting touch: Instead of toying with the audience, it toys with the characters. We have information they desperately desire, and we watch them dueling in misdirection.
The movie stars Sandra Bullock as Cassie Mayweather, a veteran detective, experienced enough to trust her hunches and resist the obvious answers. Ben Chaplin is Sam Kennedy, her by-the-book partner, the kind of cop who gets an A for every step of his investigation but ends up with the wrong conclusion. Paired against them are Richard Haywood and Justin Pendleton (Ryan Gosling, from “The Believer,” and Michael Pitt, from “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”). These are two brainy high school kids, fascinated as Leopold and Loeb were by the possibility of proving their superiority by committing the perfect murder.
Their plan: Pick a victim completely at random, so that there is no link between corpse and killers, and leave behind no clues. The film opens with the suggestion of a suicide pact between the two teenagers, who face each other, holding revolvers to their heads, in a crumbling gothic building so improbably close to the edge of a seaside cliff that we intuit someone is going to be dangling over it by the end of the film.
Bullock’s Cassie is the central character, a good cop but a damaged human being, whose past holds some kind of fearsome grip on her present.
Cassie and Sam are assigned to a creepy case; the body of a middle-aged female has been found in a wooded area, and close analysis of clues (hair, strands from a rug) seems to lead back to a suspect. Sam is happy to follow the clues to their logical conclusion. Cassie isn’t so sure, and a chance meeting with one of the young sociopaths leads to a suspicion: “Something’s not right with that kid.” We learn a lot about police work in “Murder by Numbers,” and there’s a kind of fascination in seeing the jigsaw puzzle fall into place, especially since the audience holds some (but not all) of the key pieces. Many of the best scenes involve an intellectual and emotional duel between the two young men, who seem to have paused on the brink of becoming lovers and decided to sublimate that passion into an arrogant crime. Richard and Justin are smart–Justin smarter in an intellectual way, Richard better at manipulating others. The movie wisely reserves details of who did what in the killing, and why.
