Sometimes, the story behind a project’s making can be more interesting and engaging than the finished product. Such is the case of Gentle Monster, Marie Kreutzer’s latest and the follow-up to her critically acclaimed Corsage. Its development started during the production of that 2022 Sissi pseudo-biopic, when the Austrian director began contacting police, psychologists, and other experts who could help her develop a script inspired by the pedophile ring scandal that had been revealed a couple of years earlier by the Die Zeit newspaper. But what was born as an attempt at exploring the complex realities hidden in the sordid story took a turn when, after Corsage’s successful run, it was discovered that one of its stars was involved in similar criminal activity.
Florian Teichtmeister played the emperor to Vicky Krieps’ empress, and was sentenced to a suspended two-year prison term for possession and production of the sordid materials. For Kreutzer, an examination of realities far away from herself suddenly became a matter too close for comfort. The director considered scrapping the whole thing but instead reinvented Gentle Monster as a gesture of self-reflection cum self-therapizing through art. The main question put forward is one about how much we truly know those we believe to understand beyond measure, those closest and most beloved. The unknowability of “the other” is central and terrifying. Yet, the reckoning with this and other ideas remains frustratingly shallow, as if we’re witnessing a film still trying to find itself…
Subtlety is overrated, but we need not dismiss it altogether. Marie Kreutzer seems to disagree, judging by how she starts Gentle Monster with Léa Seydoux’s French pianist performing “Would I Lie to You?” on her home piano. Inevitably, her private performance is interrupted by the distraction of Philip, her husband, having an outright panic attack complete with hyperventilating and all the trimmings. As it happens, he's been lying to her a whole deal, but she won’t discover it for a while, as Gentle Monster eases us into the world of the Weiss family, recently moved from Munich to the Austrian countryside to help with the patriarch’s burnout and raise their son away from the city’s pandemonium.
The move implied Lucy - for that is Seydoux’s character’s name - would sacrifice her career and distance herself further away from her own family, which, to our understanding, seems to mostly comprise a single, no-nonsense but not uncaring mother, Eloise, played by Catherine Deneuve. The potential for resentment settles over the household like a stifling atmosphere long before any indiscretion is uncovered. Comparisons to Anatomy of a Fall are probably inevitable, even if reductive in nature. These are very different films, one much more provocative than the other despite the latter’s putative tackling of hot-button issues. One big difference is that, for better or worse, the husband is an actual character here, or the shade of one, rather than his memory.
And what an alarming screen figure he turns out to be. Surely, anyone going into the cinema or pressing play on Gentle Monster on Netflix later this month will have some idea of the picture’s themes. Which makes Kreutzer, DP Judith Kaufmann, and editor Ulrike Kofler’s rendering of his domestic presence a troubling game of insinuation, as he walks around the place naked, every interaction between the man and his son an opportunity for alarm bells to start ringing in the audience’s mind. It’s not that the behavior is inappropriate, per se, but that the framing of it suggests something sinister, feigned casualness more unnerving than outward iniquity.
Methodically, a rhythm of sorts is established, a quotidian of familiar cycles that include morning runs, professional frustrations never fully shared with one’s partner, and ungratifying sex between the Weiss parents. It all bears the marks of the calm before the storm, studiously constructed in anticipation of something that will come to disrupt it all. When it comes, it’s on a day like any other. The police knock on the door and apprehend Philip, take him into custody and collect a bounty of his electronic devices to take along to the station for a deep dive by their team. The couple's reactions are in stark contrast. Laurence Rupp plays Philip as someone who, in some deep recess of himself, always knew this was coming. He’s resigned, possessed by some perverse sort of serenity.
Seydoux’s Lucy, on the other hand, is like a shipwreck survivor, lost at sea, floating in the violent waves, unable to grasp any sense of direction or stability. Unanchored, she’s left ignorant of the department her husband’s been taken to until she tries to reach him in jail, first suspecting he was taken in for drug-related charges. Here, you’d think Kreutzer would remain laser-focused on her leading lady’s exquisite portraiture of one for whom the whole world has stopped making sense, familial order overturned, truth hollowed out of meaning into something that has to be a lie but isn’t. But it has to be, for that is the only way to move forward and accept that kernel of love that still lives inside one’s heart.
Instead, the director disperses the narrative, broadening its scope to one of the detectives on the case. Agent Elsa Kühn, painted in strokes of appropriate disaffection and stoicism by Jella Hass, feels, in retrospect, like an artifact of the original shape Gentle Monster was meant to take before the Teichetmeister revelations shook Kreutzer to her core. Still, an explanation does not a justification make, much less an excuse for shoddy storytelling. This narrative thread never really makes sense with the rest of the movie, destroying its dramatic propulsion and killing whatever emotional surge was starting to form in the main plot whenever we’re forced to cut away from a woman whose life is unraveling to the woman who is, at some level, the face of the system that kickstarted said unraveling - rationally, Philip is to blame, but people aren't prone to reason in affliction.
To be fair, it’s not as schematic as all that. Because Elsa is more than just her job, and her tale involves more than catching suspected sex pests while on duty. We follow the agent home, learn she’s from Munich like the Weiss once were, and that her father, who has dementia, started to commit the sort of transgressions her unit is brought in to investigate. In his infirm state, he’s become more sexually aggressive than he ever was before, lashing out at the live-in nurse who takes care of him 24/7 and is thus trapped in a shared domesticity with her assailant. The black-and-white morality that guides Elsa's professional life suddenly disappears as she tries to control an untenable situation in which notions of agency are twisted by personal attachment and cognitive degeneration that complicate the ethics at hand.
Alas, Gentle Monster isn’t Queen at Sea, nor Tender Loving Care, nor All of a Sudden, nor the Brazilian London, nor a litany of other projects that have tackled similar themes with bracing lucidity this cinematic year. Instead, it seems to faff about, wasting time with a quasi-co-lead that never stops dragging the film down like a dead appendage demanding emergency amputation. Yes, Elsa may be a hypocrite, and yes, like Lucy didn’t know the man she married, perhaps the policewoman also doesn’t fully grasp the father whose id is unleashed when the mind’s infrastructure collapses around it. None of that makes the digression work within Gentle Monster, and its surface-level, somewhat rushed treatment strikes a note of trivialization that’s most unsettling for those of us expecting a film of some integrity and coherence.
These women’s stories ultimately represent a comment on the human condition. When what we sense to be our place in the world is turned upside down, there’s an instinctual, perchance primordial, impulse to return everything to what it was before. There’s comfort in the status quo, a security that helps settle us into reality, and jeopardizing it may prove a personal apocalypse. So, we believe in lies we might more soberly question in different circumstances, and lie even to ourselves. We work to make those lies true, to convince others and the one who stares back at us in the mirror that normalcy is returned, preserved, eternal. It’s an animalistic thing that Seydoux articulates better than Haase, partly because the writing lets her do more and the camera lingers long enough to document it.
Not that the script is on her side all the way through Gentle Monster. A flashback with a hard-to-parse purpose stuck in the middle of things confuses the imbroglio further, leaving Seydoux trapped in dramatic dysfunction and Rupp altogether unmoored. Still, it’s undeniable how riveting it can be to watch Seydoux process through Lucy’s personal torment, reacting to her son’s interview with a court-appointed psychologist as if she were in a horror film. She can tap into repression and self-denial, or explode with a nuanced take on the tragedienne’s specialty, or a final girl displaced from genre cinema into a drama more about the existential nightmare of living forever mired in uncertainty, never knowing if your worst fears are justified or mere paranoia.
Which is why Deneuve slashes through Gentle Monster so sharply. Because she’s the only character on screen who seems distant enough from the central action to look at it clear-eyed and sober, there’s far too little of her in the final edit. Still, her maternal support to Seydoux is superb, with a dash of vinegar to dissipate whatever sweetness one might feel overwhelm the film when she’s around. Sardonic and sublime, this living legend of European cinema makes Gentle Monster feel so much greater than itself when Kreutzer allows her to dominate the scene, to steal the spotlight, to be a star standing on the sidelines not to outshine the next generation, but to illuminate the greater depths their characterizations could afford
Oh well, Seydoux is great and Deneuve greater still. Neither of them can save Gentle Monster from its own mediocrity, the air of half-formed thoughts put on screen before they were done baking in the oven of an auteur’s self-reflection. It doesn’t help that the form is rather prosaic beyond the miracles that happen when you point a camera at Seydoux’s face and the needless ways the editing splinters a script that can already come across as both willfully convoluted and as an unfinished first draft in need of a few more passes – perchance a hundred or so would do? Given the rigorous work Kreutzer delivered in Corsage and The Ground Beneath My Feet before it, we can hope this is a minor setback in Kreutzer’s path as a filmmaker rather than an indication of decline. And to think this was her debut in the Cannes Main Competition! What was Frémaux thinking?
Gentle Monster is currently in theaters, with Netflix distributing it in a limited release. It’s quite the short theatrical run because, by November 18, it’ll have its streaming debut.