Gentle Monster Review – a tragic drama about two women facing the truth about the men they love | Cannes Film Festival

MArie Kreutzer is an Austrian director who has created impressive and visually stunning films such as the psychological thriller Beneath My Feet and Habsburg biopic Corsage. Now he brings us a silent and suspenseful Franco-German drama about two women who are bound by the care and loyalty of the men in their lives. One notices something bad about her husband and immediately rejects him, the other loves his difficult job as a police officer, and is very dependent on the cleaner/caretaker who takes care of her elderly father.

Léa Seydoux plays the first, Lucy Weiss, a French singer who has become obsessed, although she sticks to her experimental pop-classical hybrid style. His mother, played in a cameo by Catherine Deneuvehe was a classically accomplished pianist. Lucy has a nice house in Munich with her German TV director husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), and their nine-year-old son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet). But Philip has been breaking down, fainting and crying in Lucy’s arms, apparently from overwork and a drug problem. He agrees to move to the village to ease his emotional pain, and for a while things look good. Philip is obviously very devoted to Johnny, playing him and Lucy on a little errand, and building his son a trampoline in the garden.

But Elsa, played by Jella Haase, a detective from Munich, appears at their door, accompanied by a dangerous team of about half of uniformed officers with search warrants, who want to take away all of Philip’s computers, tablets and phones. Surprised, Lucy asks Elsa – and Philip – what it’s all about, and Philip, though suspicious, is unable to answer.

Haase’s performance gives Elsa a fierce, calm, professional police look: unassuming but not at odds with her slicked-back hair; This is in stark contrast to Lucy’s usually sleepy desires, which from now on break into nightmares, like a sleepy man shaking. Regarding Philip’s words, Kreutzer subtly asks us to compare it to another case that Elsa and her gang are investigating. He appears at the suspect’s door and the man in the house opens it, he sees the police, he realizes the next moment what this means, but his immediate denial and his disgust make his voice less polite when he asks if he can help.

As for Philip, he spins Lucy several dangerous lies: that he was looking for these on social networks and photo sharing sites on the Internet as research for new documents – or, more clearly, that he was only selling these photos for “money”, to buy the new world. And Lucy’s pain is her need to believe him, to twist and change what she sees to fit Philip’s explanations. As for Elsa, she does not hesitate to find the culprit at work, but at home she makes excuses for her father, Hermann (Sylvester Groth), while inappropriately harassing her maid, Natalia (Patrycja Ziółkowska).

The bottom line is that if all of this includes Johnny; Philip swears it’s not, but Elsa says that, although the police, a psychiatrist and a doctor did not find evidence of torture, one cannot be sure, and this is not knowing that it is the pain of drama. This is a dark, hopeless movie with two excellent performances.