Marie Kreutzer, the Austrian director known for the psychological thriller The Ground Beneath My Feet and the Habsburg biopic Corsage, returns with Gentle Monster, a coldly eloquent and disquieting Franco-German drama. The film explores the lives of two women trapped by their duty of care and loyalty to the men they love. One discovers a terrible truth about her husband and immediately enters a state of negotiated denial; the other, a dedicated police officer, relies on a live-in caregiver to look after her difficult elderly father.
Two Women, Two Ordeals
Léa Seydoux portrays Lucy Weiss, a French musician who has built a niche following with her experimental pop-classical hybrid performances. Her mother, played in a cameo by Catherine Deneuve, was a more conventionally successful concert pianist. Lucy lives comfortably in Munich with her German TV director husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), and their lively nine-year-old son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet). However, Philip suffers a breakdown, collapsing sobbing in Lucy's arms due to overwork and drug problems. She agrees to move to the countryside to soothe his emotional pain, and for a while, things seem to improve. Philip appears devoted to Johnny, playfully filming him and Lucy for a personal project and building a trampoline in the garden.
But their peaceful life is shattered when Elsa (Jella Haase), a detective with the Munich police, arrives at their door with a search warrant and half a dozen uniformed officers. They demand all of Philip's computers, tablets, and smartphones. Stunned, Lucy asks Elsa and Philip what is happening. Philip, clearly aware of the situation, cannot answer.
Haase's Fierce Performance
Haase's performance gives Elsa a fierce, calm, professional cop's gaze—uncompromising but not confrontational, with her hair tied back. This contrasts sharply with Lucy's tousled, often sleepy sensuality, which disintegrates into a kind of horror, like a sleepwalker shaken awake. Kreutzer cleverly invites us to compare Philip's expression to that of another suspect Elsa's division is investigating. When police show up at a door, the man of the house opens it, sees the police, realizes what this is about, but his instant denial and aversion keep his expression politely blank as he asks if he can help.
Philip spins Lucy a series of fatuous lies: that he was viewing material on chat groups and online forums as research for a new documentary, or even more implausibly, that he was brokering these images for money to afford their new country home. Lucy's ordeal is her need to believe him, to twist and contort what she sees to fit his shifting explanations. Meanwhile, Elsa is unbending in her pursuit of wrongdoing at work but at home desperately makes excuses for her father, Hermann (Sylvester Groth), when he inappropriately harasses his care worker, Natalia (Patrycja Ziółkowska).
The Central Question
The film's central point is whether all this involves Johnny. Philip swears it does not, but Elsa says that despite the police child psychiatrist and doctor finding no evidence of abuse, one can never be sure. This not knowing is the drama's agony. Gentle Monster is a bleak, pessimistic film with two excellent lead performances. It screened at the Cannes film festival.
