by Hudson Moura
Peter Dourountzis’s Vultures (Rapaces) descends into a France where organized, paramilitary rape-gangs terrorize cities and where the aftershocks of that violence travel through institutions, media, and families. Rather than stage a crusading-journalist fable, the film binds three vectors—social critique, professional ethnography, and intimate drama—around a father–daughter pair: Samuel (Sami Bouajila), a seasoned reporter at the sensationalist crime magazine Détective, and Ava (Mallory Wanecque), his apprentice in both craft and proximity. Their beat is the gutter—missing girls, sordid leads, late-night stakeouts—and Dourountzis treats the dying world of print as a school of method and a moral pressure cooker: deadlines, thin budgets, the tactile rituals of note-taking and page dummies, the grudging coexistence with TV crews who will synthesize in two minutes what print toils to document.
Crucially, the film refuses easy partitions of virtue and vice. In this trade, saving a victim and “getting the story first” can become the same gesture; outrage is real, but so is the market for outrage. Bouajila plays Samuel as professional carapace—fluent in procedure, allergic to sentiment—while Wanecque’s Ava supplies the counterweight: she wants the craft to reach her absent father and to see the world through his eyes, yet she keeps balking at the coldness the job requires. Their rapport is the film’s heartbeat, by turns tender, abrasive, and revealing of how newsroom habits migrate home.
Formally, Vultures is exact without being lurid. Dourountzis stages violence obliquely—faces, breath, the before and after—declining the genre’s usual catalog of wounds. The strongest stretch is a breath-shortening rendezvous with the abductors, a sequence cut to the logic of fear rather than spectacle; spatial clarity and sonic restraint keep the dread legible without aestheticizing it. If the film sometimes toggles too briskly between its registers—investigative workflow, media-industry portrait, father–daughter melodrama—the braid usually holds, and the occasional didactic line about “print versus television” is absorbed by the texture of work: sources ghost, editors hover, images must be chosen with care because they will outlive copy.
What Vultures ultimately argues—quietly, and to its credit—is that there are no pure positions here. Reporters are neither heroic avengers nor ghouls feeding off misery; they are functionaries navigating a field where empathy and exploitation cohabit. Ava embodies that tension: she refuses the numbness the profession demands but also learns why that numbness is a survival tool. If the film stops short of a full ethical inquest—its debate over method is touched rather than prosecuted—it compensates with observational acuity and performances that honor ambivalence. The result is a tough, unsentimental thriller that looks squarely at gendered terror while scrutinizing the very machinery that turns terror into narrative. 
Rating: 3.5/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 