Gentle Monster

Kreutzer threads a fine needle through difficult material in a film that, even if it occasionally pulls its punches, will niggle on in your mind.

It’s a necessarily tough watch, with an engrossing performance from Seydoux that makes Lucy’s every flicker of hope and stab of dread feel like your own.

This is a bleak, pessimistic film with two excellent lead performances.

For all its measuredness, Gentle Monster is a merciless film, not so much to the viewers but its titular character––a gesture some may deem exaggerated, yet there is a tenderness that steers Kreutzer’s script away from revenge, humiliation, or brutal punishment. For its taboo subject matter, this already says a lot.

In the context of such a terrible crime, Kreutzer is naturally less concerned with right and wrong than she is with the way that even the most sordid type of abuse is able to disguise itself in domesticity. If victims are our friends and neighbors, then it stands to reason that perpetrators are too.

Gentle Monster is a meticulously plausible depiction of the dissolution of a family under the most trust-annihilating of circumstances, but that is all it is.

Gentle Monster is perhaps a bit two striated in its examination of these two women and their eventual choices.