Critic Reviews

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

Like a photograph developing in a bath of chemicals, Kreutzer’s strategies and themes slowly become clearer, and the scene isn’t pretty.

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.

Though Kreutzer never lets any adult character off the moral hook . . . she also refuses to shade these relationships with outright antagonism. Instead, they are all appraising one another, weighing others’ actions to balance their own ethical scales, and in doing so, trying to better understand themselves. That’s the same reason we turn to art.

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.

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.

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.

[Kreutzer] might have served Gentle Monster better by narrowing her focus to a pure character study. But one hardly has to squint to find those elements in the film. They’re present every time Kreutzer trains the camera on Seydoux and lets her demonstrate why she’s among cinema’s finest working actresses.

Seydoux’s gut-wrenching performance at the center of Gentle Monster, combined with a sensitive approach to horrifying subject matter, makes a tough watch equally compelling.

The film is most effective in conveying the sense of life’s foundations and certainties being suddenly undermined, and the doubt and panic that creeps into previously happy memories.