Marie Kreutzer’s “Gentle Monster” opens with virtuoso musician Lucy Weiss (Léa Seydoux) sitting at the piano in her Munich apartment and plunking out a stilted but affecting cover of Charles & Eddie’s neo-soul classic “Would I Lie to You?”This is before her Austrian husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) — a documentary TV producer of marginal success — comes home in a burnout panic that spurs them to permanently relocate their family to a cottage in the German countryside. Before the authorities bang on their door with a warrant for Philip’s arrest, forcing Lucy to ride the elevator up to the clearly designated “child porn” floor of the local police station in order to learn the facts of his case. Before she begins to wonder, in rage and terror and desperate layers of self-protective doubt, whether the father of her young son Johnny (Malo Blanchet) might actually be capable of preying on other kids, or even his own. Among other things, this tough and unflinching social drama is a study in how painful it can be for a rhetorical question — like “Would I lie to you, baby?,” for example — to sour into the stomach-churning stuff of an urgent mystery. For the terms of a relationship to change faster than the facts of the matter are able to keep up with, let alone the feelings that might attend to them. “There is no ‘off button’ for pedophilia,” someone explains to Lucy at one point. There isn’t an “off button” for love either. Perhaps that’s why Lucy was able to ignore the signs for so long, some of which the audience is given the chance to see in a dark and disquieting flashback that Kreutzer cleverly interjects during the movie’s second act. Perhaps, despite the less intimate nature of their relationship, that’s why Kreutzer herself was so inclined to believe the male lead of her previous film (“Corsage”) when he privately disputed the rumors that he was guilty of similar crimes. Actor Florian Teichtmeister ultimately pleaded guilty to possessing more than 76,000 child sexual abuse files, more than half of which showed children under the age of 14. While Kreutzer surely laments that situation on several different levels, this is neither a penitent film nor a self-exculpatory one (its origins trace back to before the production of “Corsage,” when the director read a newspaper article about a pedophile ring in North Rhine-Westphalia). It’s safe to assume that most people will feel sick to their souls on Lucy’s behalf, but “Gentle Monster” — its title pointedly depriving us of Lucy’s natural doubt — doesn’t make any overt pleas for sympathy, just as it doesn’t render Philip as the kind of demon that anyone might see coming a mile away.In the context of such a terrible crime, Kreutzer is naturally less concerned with right and wrong than she is with the way that even the most sordid type of abuse is able to disguise itself in domesticity. If victims are our friends and neighbors, then it stands to reason that perpetrators are too.~this review continues on IndieWire~
