Gentle Monster

Can we ever truly know anyone else, even the people with whom we’ve chosen to spend our lives? This is the chilling question at the core of Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s follow-up to TIFF ’22’s Corsage. Featuring an emotionally intricate performance from Léa Seydoux (TIFF ’25’s Silent Friend; also at this year’s Festival in The Unknown) and an elegant cameo from Catherine Deneuve, Gentle Monster considers what monstrousness lies hiding in our very homes.

Experimental musician Lucy Weiss (Seydoux) crafts deconstructed pop songs on unconventional instruments. Her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp, TIFF ’25’s Rise of the Raven) is a filmmaker, though he has been working in television to pay the bills. After Philip suffers a breakdown, the couple, along with their nine-year-old Johnny (Malo Blanchet), relocate from Munich to the countryside. 

But their bucolic idyll collapses when a sex crimes unit, led by officer Else Kühn (Jella Haase), arrives to seize the family’s digital devices — and to arrest Philip. As the case against him becomes increasingly difficult to deny, her attention shifts to her son Johnny — and the terrifying possibility that he might be involved.

Kreutzer’s measured handling of this freighted material allows us to identify with Lucy’s harrowing journey and also with Else, who has unspoken domestic concerns of her own. What emerges is a dual portrait of women trapped in moral maelstroms in their families. These are bracing stories of breaches of trust, but there’s hope in the profound humanity invested in the women’s experience.

ANITA LEE

Content advisory: sexual content, mature themes