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“Gentle Monster” lets you fall a little in love with Lucy, Philip and their young son Johnny, before you screw it all up. This is a film about moral and social evil and the webs we might spin to give a loved one the benefit of the doubt. Filmmaker Marie Kreutzer isn’t interested in letting the audience off the hook with a seemingly villainous villain.
Instead, Philip (Laurence Rupp) seems to be a loving father to Johnny (Malo Blanchet) and partner to Lucy (Léa Seydoux), a popular avant garde musician who plays experimental covers of famous songs. Philip is a filmmaker who had to work in television to pay the family bills. And we meet them in transition – Lucy has been practicing the piano, a slow, melancholy version of Charlie & “Would I Lie To You” by Eddie when Philip comes home flirting. It’s a kind of breakdown.
We then see them move to a peaceful home in the German countryside, where they make love on a mattress on the floor, build a trampoline for Johnny and talk about getting rid of their mobile phones altogether. It is a quiet, peaceful and bohemian life and love and joy are evident in this family. And then, one day, several police cars come to the house with a warrant to take away Philip’s computer and hard drives. He has the ashes but doesn’t seem to be complaining. This is a man who knows why the police are there. Lucy is not.
But we will all learn together when she goes to the police station and looks for the K17 department. In the elevator she pushes the button for the second floor. K17, we find, deals with sexual violence against children and child sexual abuse images. She barely had time to register the words when the elevator door slammed open and she rushed into the office.
Philip is gone and she looks out through a window to see her in the parking lot, with his lawyer, lighting a cigarette. But he quit smoking, she says.
An officer, a young woman, Elsa Kuhn (Jella Haase), tells Lucy that Philip is involved in online forums, and there is a study in which he was able to make content himself. This is about 20 minutes in a film of almost two hours in which we and Lucy process this information.
Lucy immediately leaves the country home with Johnny, going straight to her mother’s house (Catherine Deneuve plays mom), but avoids telling her, or anyone else, the details of this sudden separation. She, you suspect, insists that it is a big misunderstanding, that there is some explanation and that she would rather not risk their friends and family knowing anything. It’s also definitely in denial, and she likes to grab onto threads that might make her a little worse in her mind. But really, how comfortable is it to believe that Philip may have done it for money instead of pleasure? And then there’s going to be the question of whether Johnny could be a victim as well.
Seydoux is very rude in this difficult film and role, with the camera often resting on her face in close-up. There are no obvious Oscar reels here, monologues or breakdowns. Instead, she really pulls you in and holds your attention in a slow movie where not much happens.
We also get a little insight into Elsa’s home life, where her abusive father seems to be getting used to harassing her female caretakers. Elsa, for whom the matter is so black and white in her role, offers more money to a nurse on the way out the door to stay and look the other way.
Kreutzer, the Austrian writer-director, was inspired to start working on this idea by disturbing reports about a pedophile network in Germany. Then she was also uncomfortably close to the situation. The main actor in her excellent film Empress Elisabeth “Corsage,” Florian Teichtmeister, was accused of possessing and producing images of child sexual abuse and would have been found guilty.
Some have criticized “Gentle Monster” for not digging deeper, for not offering any resolution, for conveying the uncomfortable idea that we are the enablers of the villains and perhaps even suggesting that no men should be trusted.
I don’t think Kreutzer is saying that all people are secret pedophiles or sex pests, even if you might walk out of “Gentle Monster” with that nagging feeling. Lines blur when loved ones are involved, and mothers always want to protect their sons.
There is always that neighbor who says things like “he was always nice to me” or “I would have been the last one to suspect that he would do this.” “Gentle Monster” is a film that asks you to question your own problem, to remove the blinders that are vague and lazy and just look a little more closely at our world. Like Lucy’s songs, it’s a broken social horror in a catchy, minor key.
“Gentle Monster,” Netflix’s release in theaters Friday and streaming November 18, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “graphic nudity, some language and sexuality.” Running time: 114 minutes. Three stars out of four.
