OVERVIEW
A renowned concert pianist (Léa Seydoux) moves with her husband and young son from Munich to the German countryside, hoping a quieter life will help him recover from burnout. The new house is barely unpacked when police officers arrive at the door one morning with a search warrant for her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp). The film follows Lucy from that morning onward as everything she thought she knew about her husband begins to crumble.
BACKGROUND
Kreutzer began the script in summer 2020, after reading a long, detailed German article about a disturbing subject and imagining what she would do in that situation. Nearly three years later, during the Oscar campaign for her previous film, cast member Florian Teichtmeister was charged with a crime of exactly that kind, prompting Kreutzer to almost walk away from the project until ultimately concluding the parallel was even more reason to make it. The film is the Austrian’s first Cannes Competition title, after Un Certain Regard for Corsage won a Best Performance prize for its lead.
THE REVIEW
At the core of Gentle Monster sit some of the hardest questions cinema can ask. How a person becomes capable of the unthinkable. How the people who love him fail to see it. What the discovery does to everyone around him, and especially to the person most directly affected. Gentle Monster glances at these questions and, for the most part, refuses to engage with them, and the little it chooses to explore is extremely troubling.
Adopting a structure close to the 2023 Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, the film spends its first half unpacking its central puzzle and walking us through Lucy’s journey of discovery. What has her husband done? Has he really done it? These become the central questions that, for a while, hold the viewer’s attention, with an initial hook not far from Netflix’s Adolescence and the many miniseries built on the same trick. The reveal is heavily foreshadowed and, at least for me, was no surprise, so when it finally arrived, all I could think was, “You sure took your time.” As in Adolescence, the mystery is not really the point. Once it gets out of the way, the film positions itself to explore what lies beneath, and that is where it falls apart.
Across Lucy’s scenes with the detective Elsa, her mother, her husband, and her son, the film rarely delves into what lies beneath the surface. It circles back, cuts scenes short before they reach anything interesting, and reaches for blunt remarks when it doesn’t know how to close, such as Lucy saying she will “speak with her piano.” Its conclusion, repeated in multiple ways, reduces the whole thing to a “matter of power.”
That the argument registers at all is Seydoux’s doing. Her performance is intricate, working the crying scenes without leaning on them, and she carries a quiet passivity through the rest of the film, a woman unable to earn the respect of her own husband, child, or her mother. Seeing her play such a vulnerable character is a treat, and one of the best actresses working today makes the most of the wretched material.
Aside from the power angle, the film draws a clumsy parallel between Lucy and Elsa, with Lucy asking the detective to reveal her darkest secrets and Elsa refusing to answer honestly. What Elsa is hiding is her father’s dementia, and the inappropriate advances he has been making toward the family’s home caregivers. Comparing this to Philip’s actions is utterly irresponsible and uninformed. Dementia removes the capacity to control behavior. The behavior at the center of Philip’s case requires premeditation, encryption, networks, and hours of sustained action. Treating one as a lens for the other is excuse-making dressed as moral complexity, and Kreutzer never builds an argument strong enough to defend it.
If the thematic core were not problematic enough, the filmmaking around it has its own confusions. Elsa’s hip-hop playlist always jump scares. Lucy chases Philip’s car at one point in a beat so melodramatic it pulled me completely out of the film. And ultimately, the script never gives the audience a reason Lucy fell in love with him in the first place, which is fatal in a film built entirely around her refusal to let him go. The film keeps asking Seydoux to compensate for what the screenplay never sets up, and at some point, even she runs out of room.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Gentle Monster chooses to tackle a very complex topic without the necessary perspective, squandering many of the interesting threads raised by the script. There were dozens of different angles, each full of potential, and what the film chooses to say instead is deeply problematic. I left the film disgusted by the character’s actions, and disgusted again by the toothless filmmaking around them.