Review: 'Gentle Monster' is a drama in which star Léa Seydoux does everything right while so much around her goes wrong
The French actress Léa Seydoux gives a compelling performance in “Gentle Monster,” writer-director Maria Kreutzer’s cross-European drama that manages to get so much wrong about the disturbing subject matter in the story around her.
(Consider this your one warning: I can’t discuss this movie adequately without revealing an early plot point on which the entire movie pivots. It would be considered a spoiler only to the Netflix marketing department, who are working diligently to keep this plot point hidden.)
Seydoux plays Lucy Weiss, a French pianist and experimental musician, who sells out concert halls with her avant-garde interpretations of pop songs. Her mother, Eloise (the great Catherine Deneuve), is also a famous pianist, we’re told, but Lucy’s work is categorized as a rejection of her mother’s classical style. This doesn’t turn out to be important in the story, but it’s an interesting distraction from what’s coming.
Lucy lives in a country house outside Munich, with her husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), a German documentary filmmaker, and their son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet), who’s about 10. One day, Lucy wakes up to the sound of Munich police serving a search warrant on Philip, taking all of his computers and other devices — on suspicion of trafficking in child sexual assault material. (The Munich cops still use the phrase “child porn,” which advocates have urged writers to avoid, because the word “porn” implies consent and children cannot give consent at their age.)
The rest of the movie largely shows Lucy trying to sort out in her mind whether her husband, the father of their child, is capable of such horrible actions. She has to listen to his excuses — he was doing research for a documentary, or he was dealing in such images for the money — and determine what’s a lie, while willing herself to ask the most unthinkable question: Did Philip ever take or distribute images of Johnny?
Meanwhile, Kreutzer invests much of the film’s running time with the lead police detective, Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase), Her scenes involve a complicated home life, centered on her aging father (Sylvester Groth) and the live-in nurse (Patrycja Ziółkowska) who threatens to quit because Dad won’t keep his hands to himself.
Seydoux, known on both sides of the Atlantic for such films as “Blue Is the Warmest Color” and “No Time to Die,” gives a stunning performance, channeling the confusion, grief and rage of a woman learning that the man she raised a son with isn’t at all who she thought he was. Seydoux also brings out the best from Deneuve, that French institution, who at one point here gives one of the best double-takes I’ve ever seen.
But Kreutzer, whose best-known movie to date was the Vicky Krieps-starring period piece “Corsage,” overloads this modern story with extraneous distractions from Lucy’s main path. Between the muddled message of contrasting Lucy’s life to Elsa’s and the self-congratulatory atmosphere that comes in a movie tackling a disturbing subject like this one, “Gentle Monster” is as heavy-handed as a TV weepie and about as unpleasant.
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‘Gentle Monster’
★★1/2
Opens Friday, October 30, in theaters. Rated R for sexuality, graphic nudity and some language. Running time: 114 minutes; in English, French and German, with subtitles.