Review: Not even Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve can save “Gentle Monster”
Sunday, November 1, 2026 at 6:00PM 
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…
