‘Dog 51’ review: Cedric Jimenez’s high-octane thriller is set in a near-future Paris

Dir: Cedric Jimenez. France. 2025. 102mins

Paris is not so much the city of light as a Big Brother police state in Cedric Jimenez’ high-octane thriller. Taking place in the near future it sees the French capital divided into three zones that separate the social classes, and a predictive AI having revolutionised law enforcement.  With its doses of Blade Runner, pinches of Hunger Games, and bucketfuls of any number of movies in which an unorthodox but decent cop goes rogue, Dog 51 is not exactly original. It is, however, an engaging ride, untroubled by its own clichés, one that – paradoxically – adorns this post-democratic dystopia with more than a soupçon of Parisian romance, energy and sex appeal. The smouldering double act between mismatched cops Salia (Adele Exarchopoulos) and Zem (Gilles Lellouche) provides the fuel.

More than a soupçon of Parisian romance, energy and sex appeal

The director has declared that Dog 51, which has been chosen to close the 2025 Venice Film Festival before playing Toronto, is the final part of a loose ‘police’ trilogy that began with the Marseilles drug-squad drama The Stronghold in 2020 and continued with Paris terror attack feature November in 2022. But Jimenez’s latest actioner works perfectly well as a standalone offering, one that aims – like so many near-future dramas – to show that an Orwellian nightmare future is not that far away.

Some of the points Dog 51 makes will resonate more in France than elsewhere. Elswhere, it may be hampered a little by the subtitles on what is by no means an arthouse movie. Yet it’s easy to imagine this working in film-friendly cities as a classy high-paced date movie, and its streaming-service pick-up potential looks strong.

The socio-geographical divisions of the future Paris we see in Dog 51 are efficiently sketched in via an opening action sequence that acts as a reverse pan from the centre of privilege and power to the banlieues of the dispossessed. Zone 1, where a prominent government AI advisor is assassinated in the courtyard of his townhouse, consists of the two islands in the Seine where the city was founded, and is reserved for the (literally) ruling class. Zone 2, which surrounds it, taking in landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, is where the rest of the ‘haves’ live and work, protected by a technologically advanced police force that uses a software developed by the murdered tech whizz to solve crimes in real time, via computer-generated scenarios that are rated on a scale of probability.

Lellouche’s Zem is a jaded, frustrated cop working the rubbish-strewn streets in Zone 3; Exarchopoulos’s Salia is part of an elite Zone 2 police squad. They are thrown together when she arrives on Zem’s beat in pursuit of the murderer. She looks down on his undisciplined, whatever-works approach to policing; he sees her as a stuck-up bitch. Each are rebels in their own way, and their initially creaky buddy act is greased by their discovery that the crime-solving artificial intelligence software used by their police departments has developed a mind and will of its own, and gone all HAL on the French state. The revelation is delivered, in part, by an underground resistance group called Breakwalls headed up by John (Louis Garrel), who comes on like a bank manager trying desperately to be street.

Dog 51 is good on the bureaucracy of surveillance, its grey administrative face. Citizens are tracked via face recognition and the electronic tracking bracelets everyone (even the police) is required to wear. But it’s also an efficient edge-of-the-seat thriller, one with very little slack. A leisurely script might have made more of a character played by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, a kindly doctor who works pro bono in a Zone 3 community centre, but Jimenez’ tasty genre number is keen to cut, literally, to the chase – and it’s the right call. Guillaume Roussel’s sombre soundtrack plays up the story’s tone of romantic, tragic fatalism – lightened musically only as the final credits unspool to the Pink Floyd’s ’Wish You Were Here’.