Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Lt. Dave Robicheaux, a detective in New Iberia, Louisiana, is trying to link the murder of a local hooker to New Orleans mobster Julie (Baby Feet) Balboni, who is co-producer of a Civil War film. At the same time, after Elrod Sykes, the star of the film, reports finding another corpse in the Atchafalaya Swamp near the movie set, Robicheaux starts another investigation, believing the corpse to be the remains of a black man who he saw being murdered 35 years before.
In the Electric Mist is a Southern Gothic crime drama anchored by Tommy Lee Jones's brooding, deeply inhabited performance as Dave Robicheaux — arguably one of his most nuanced roles. Bertrand Tavernier brings a distinctly European art-house sensibility to Louisiana bayou atmosphere, and the cinematography captures the humid, decaying landscape with real visual poetry. The plot weaves dual timelines and multiple threads in an ambitious way, though the narrative becomes somewhat tangled and loses momentum in its middle sections. The film's novelty lies mainly in its unusual marriage of French directorial restraint with an American pulp crime story and supernatural Civil War elements. The ending, however, disappoints — the resolution feels rushed and dramatically unsatisfying, failing to pay off the atmospheric tension that Tavernier carefully builds throughout.