Gentle Monster

‘Would I lie to you, baby?’ So sings Bond star Léa Seydoux’s pop-inflected concert pianist, Lucy, in a slow-burn reworking of the Charles & Eddie hit at the open of Corsage director Marie Kreutzer’s latest. A niggling worry that creeps around the corners of this austere, guarded film. 

The first sign that something’s not quite right comes when Lucy must comfort her filmmaker husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), who collapses mid-panic attack in the hall of their Munich apartment. He’s says he’s burnt out, insisting they move to a rustic rural homestead with their precocious kid, Johnny (Malo Blanchet).

But no sooner has the bucolic bliss begun than Jella Haase’s detective Elsa bursts their bubble, rocking up with a cohort of cops while vaping and blasting techno in her car. They’ve come to seize Philip’s phone, computer, laptop and thumb drives. His face is a glistening sheen of sweaty guilt.

Seydoux, an incredibly gifted actor, nails the flustered, frightened panic. It’s not until she arrives at the cop shop and takes the lift to Elsa’s office that she realises Philip’s accused crime: purveying paedophilic images. All denial, defence and disbelief, Lucy’s confusions gives way to the skin-crawling horror of betrayal as an incandescent rage whirls inside. Has Philip abused Johnny?

For such a young actor, Blanchet shows incredible promise. Johnny’s giggles about hidden secrets muddy the waters just enough, even as the psychologist attached to the case insists there’s no overt sign of trauma. Rupp, too, delivers a brilliant performance with Philip’s insistence he’s a good guy who made a mistake, claiming he's researching for a film, but his story constantly shifts and turns.  

Marie Kreutzer threads a fine needle through difficult material 

Nils Strunk makes much of a smaller role as Philip’s best friend, now defence lawyer, Lukas, leaning into this purgatory of divided loyalties. Catherine Deneuve’s turn as Lucy’s withering mum is similarly compact, but she lights up every scene, insisting to her daughter that independence is best, even as a vacillating Lucy insists that there’s ‘no off button’ for love.

An actor’s piece that relishes the miscommunication gaps as it leaps from French to German to English, Gentle Monster is compelling on that level. But while Kreutzer’s commitment to the chaotic reality of this life-upending situation is commendable, there are missteps. A subplot featuring Elsa’s excuses for the wandering hands of her senile father is a stark inversion of her day job, sure, but it’s also an underbaked distraction. As is a clunkily superfluous flashback to two years earlier, telling us nothing we didn’t already know. You might also find composer Camille’s deconstructed pop cues on-the-nose, too.

Still, those performances are top notch, with cinematographer Judith Kaufmann’s camera tracing every fraught facial flicker. 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.

Gentle Monster screened at the Sydney Film Festival.