Twenty hours after a riot
La Haine is Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 account of roughly twenty hours in the lives of three young men from a Paris housing estate, made in direct response to a real killing: a young Zairian man, Makomé M’Bowolé, shot dead while handcuffed in French police custody in 1993, on the day Kassovitz began writing. The plot begins after a riot, sparked by the beating of a local man named Abdel while in police custody, has left the estate in ruins and a police officer’s revolver missing. Vinz, one of the three friends, has found the gun and vowed to kill a police officer if Abdel dies of his injuries, while his friends Hubert and Saïd try to keep him, and themselves, out of worse trouble as the day goes on.
A script written the day of a real shooting
The film follows Vinz, Hubert and Saïd — a Jewish man modelling himself on Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, a Christian Afro-French boxer trying to leave the estate behind, and a North African Muslim acting as mediator between them — as they drift from the estate into Paris, encountering hostile police, indifferent Parisians and, eventually, a group of skinheads. Kassovitz shot largely on location in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, moving the cast and crew there for three months before filming began, and used real, unstaged riot footage gathered across nearly a decade. Cinematographer Pierre Aïm’s black-and-white photography and Kassovitz’s own editing keep the film moving in something close to real time, punctuated by a single unbroken shot of DJ Cut Killer mixing Édith Piaf against KRS-One from an apartment window above the estate.
The DJ mixing Piaf into KRS-One
What lands is the film’s control of dread: because the audience knows Vinz is carrying a loaded gun and has stated his intention to use it, every encounter with police or provocation carries a weight disproportionate to what is actually said or done, and the film sustains that tension across nearly the whole runtime without resorting to a shootout to release it. The three central performances, especially Vincent Cassel’s coiled, performative anger as Vinz, give the film’s political argument a human shape rather than letting it become an essay. The Cut Killer sequence, doing nothing to advance plot, does more than any dialogue to fix the film in a specific French moment, mixing a national anthem of grief with an American protest record blasted over a housing estate about to erupt again.
A gun that changes what waiting means
A few digressions, most notably an extended scene with a Polish survivor of the gulag who tells the trio a parable they visibly don’t understand, sit oddly against the otherwise grounded realism of the rest of the film and can feel like an imported piece of art-house symbolism rather than something that belongs to these characters. The ending’s ambiguity, while thematically justified, will read to some as withholding rather than earned, since the film cuts before showing the consequence of its final standoff. A handful of encounters with Parisian civilians, including a gallery scene, are also pitched more broadly for satire than the rest of the film’s naturalism, which can jar against the otherwise unforced tone Kassovitz sustains elsewhere.
Hatred as something manufactured, not felt
The film’s governing idea, stated outright in Hubert’s line that hatred breeds hatred, is that violence in the banlieues is manufactured through repeated humiliation and provocation rather than arising naturally from the young men themselves, a case the narrative makes by having Vinz repeatedly choose not to fire the gun until circumstances outside his control finally intervene. It is also a film about surveillance and suspicion as a constant condition, since the trio are treated as suspects by police and civilians alike well before any of them does anything to warrant it.
Who should watch it
This suits viewers interested in French social realism, policing and urban inequality, or in ensemble films built around a sustained ticking-clock structure, and it rewards close attention to how tension accumulates rather than resolves. It is a difficult match for anyone who wants a plot to release its pressure through action, since Kassovitz is far more interested in the waiting than in any eventual violence. Viewers who found Do the Right Thing’s escalating single-day structure compelling will likely find a great deal to recognise here, transposed to a very different city and set of grievances.
Is 96 minutes worth it
At 96 minutes, the film moves with almost no slack, compressing a riot’s aftermath into a single day that never lets its central threat recede from view. It is not a comfortable watch, but it earns its reputation as one of the more clear-eyed films made about how a specific kind of violence gets built up to, and that makes the time spent on it worthwhile. Three decades on, its portrait of a policing crisis that Kassovitz began writing in direct response to a real death has lost little of the urgency that once led a sitting prime minister to order his own cabinet to sit through it.