Léa Seydoux stars as pianist Lucy Weiss, who reinterprets love songs written by men, in the film Gentle Monster.
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Frédéric Batier/Netflix
In the opening scenes of Gentle Monster, a loving couple relocates to a farmhouse in a bucolic corner of Bavaria with their young son.
The sweet mood is quickly interrupted when a police squad knocks at the door, with a search and seizure warrant. When a police detective informs Lucy — played by Léa Seydoux — that her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) is accused of a horrific crime, their idyllic life falls apart.
Lucy grapples with contradictory feelings — wanting to believe the man she loves but gradually realizing she doesn’t truly know him, and he may have abused their son.
“I love the fact that you can really read all the emotions she’s going through. That is something that I thought was just really well written because everything was on the page,” Seydoux told NPR. “I cried when I read the script.”
Seydoux told NPR’s Leila Fadel that she was drawn to the complexity of the part, which a number of other actors had turned down due to the heavy subject.
“The fact also that it’s through her perspective, through the woman’s perspective, that is very unusual,” she added. “I could say a lot with only a few words.”
Lucy’s (played by Léa Seydoux center) life falls apart when she learns that her husband Philip (played by Laurence Rupp, left), the father of their young son, is an accused pedophile. Gentle Monster director Marie Kreutzer, right, is shown on set, along with cinematographer Judith Kaufmann, rear right.
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Frédéric Batier/Netflix
Nothing is black and white in Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s film. Philip’s love for Lucy and their son Johnny — played by Malo Blanchet — seems genuine and Lucy wants to believe his excuses, even if they keep changing. The most horrifying factor is Philip’s normality, an everyday echo of what Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil.”
“I’m looking for a certain subtlety,” Seydoux said. “I’m always looking for a certain truth in a way, for something that is grounded and tangible. So that was the challenge.”
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The deliberately mismatched juxtaposition between peaceful setting and terrifying actions also breaks down the facade of appearances, set against disturbing realities, a theme also present in Kreutzer’s psychological thriller The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019) or the Empress Elisabeth of Austria biopic Corsage (2022).
“I’ve noticed that most of the time mothers are blamed much more than men than fathers,” said Seydoux, who gave birth to her second child shortly before the film was shot.
Legendary actress Catherine Deneuve plays the role of Lucy’s mother Eloise, who senses early on that something is wrong, and encourages her daughter to seek help.
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Frédéric Batier/Netflix
In the film, Philip’s mother tells Lucy that he is her son just like Johnny is Lucy’s, even though Philip may have abused Johnny.
“It’s a very violent scene. For me, it was one of the most shocking scenes,” Seydoux said.
The film doesn’t show any images of abuse and Lucy doesn’t witness any of her husband’s alleged misdeeds, so the terror instead lives inside her mind, and that of the audience. It’s a terror that grows with Lucy’s doubts.
“We can relate to her. It’s not only about the child abuse,” Seydoux explained. “She’s also abused in a way. She’s completely under the spell, under this man’s influence.”
As Lucy grapples with her husband’s misdeeds, the officer investigating him, Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase) faces unsettling truths about her own father, Hermann (Sylvester Groth).
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Frédéric Batier/Netflix
There are eerie parallels with a real-life scandal that emerged in early 2023, as Kreutzer’s previous feature Corsage was making its way through the awards circuit.
Florian Teichtmeister, who plays Austria’s Emperor Franz Joseph in that film —opposite Vicky Krieps as Empress Elisabeth (Sisi) — was charged with possessing child pornography.
In interviews, Kreutzer has said she was already working on the script of Gentle Monster at the time and had been inspired instead by a story she read in a newspaper.
There’s yet another mirror effect within the film itself, via a separate plot line involving the police detective investigating Philip’s case, played by Jella Haase.
When she learns her father has been harassing his caregiver at home, she struggles to confront him and mend the ruptures in their lives.
The couple’s idyllic relationship at the start of the film and Philip’s deliberately ordinary and pathetic nature make Gentle Monster an especially unsettling psychological drama.
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Frédéric Batier/Netflix
As a child, Seydoux revealed, she didn’t aspire to become an actress. That’s despite being part of French cinematic royalty — her grandfather and grand-uncle control France’s most powerful film companies, Pathé and Gaumont, respectively.
Jérôme Seydoux has primary control of Pathé, while Gaumont, the world’s oldest extant film studio, is chaired by Nicolas Seydoux. Both companies were founded in the late 19th century.
“I have this contradiction where I’ve never wanted to be an actor, but at the same time, it’s a need that I have. It’s really a way that I found to exist,” the younger Seydoux said.
She recalled being very shy when starting out as an actor, gradually finding in the art form a way to express emotions that are usually repressed in daily life.
“I like to provoke, but in a gentle way. So I think that cinema just helped me to also express a certain violence that I have… but also many different feelings,” she added. “As a teenager, I was very chaotic and to do this really helped me to find a way, to find the light.”
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Kaity Kline.