“Gentle Monster” makes you fall a little in love with Lucy, Philip, and their young son, Johnny, before ruining everything. This is a movie about moral and social evils, and the webs we can weave to give someone we love the benefit of the doubt. Filmmaker Marie Kreutzer isn’t interested in leaving the audience with a villain who looks like a bad guy.
Instead, Philip (Laurence Rupp) appears to be a loving father to Johnny (Malo Blanchet) and partner to popular avant-garde musician Lucy (Léa Seydoux), who plays experimental covers of well-known songs. Philip is a film producer who has to work in television to pay his family’s bills. And we meet them in a moment of transition – Lucy practicing at the piano, a slowed-down, melancholy version of Charles & Eddie’s “Would I Lie to You” when Philip comes home crying. In the middle of some kind of collapse.
We then see them move into a peaceful house in the German countryside, make love on a mattress on the floor, build a trampoline for Johnny, and talk about getting rid of their cell phones altogether. There is a quiet, peaceful and bohemian life, and love and joy are clearly visible in this family. And then one day, several police cars descend on the house with orders to confiscate Philip’s computer and hard drives. He’s ashen colored, but he doesn’t seem to object. This is a man who knows why the police are there. Lucy doesn’t do this.
But we will find out together when he goes to the police station and calls the K17 department. He presses the button for the second floor in the elevator. We discover that K17 is interested in images of child sexual violence and child sexual abuse. He had barely committed the words to memory and was walking towards the office in a daze when the elevator door opened brutally.
Philip left and looked out the window to see him in the parking lot, lighting a cigarette with his lawyer. But he says he quit smoking.
An officer named Elsa Kuhn (Jella Haase), a young woman, informs Lucy that Philip is active in online forums and that there is an investigation into whether he is creating content. This is about 20 minutes into the nearly two hour movie where we and Lucy process this information.
Lucy immediately leaves her countryside home with Johnny and goes directly to her mother’s house (Catherine Deneuve plays the mother), but refrains from telling him or anyone else the details of this sudden separation. You think he hopes this is all just a big misunderstanding, that there is an explanation, and that he’d rather not risk his friends and family knowing anything. This is also definitely a bit of denial, and his mind is eager to grasp onto issues that might make the situation a little less bad. But how comforting would it be to believe that Philip might actually have done this for money rather than pleasure? And then there’s the question of whether Johnny was also a victim.
Seydoux remains impressively understated in this difficult film and role; In harsh close-up the camera often stays on his face. There are no obvious Oscar reels, monologues or breakdowns here. Instead, it deftly draws you in and keeps your attention in a slow-moving movie where not much happens.
We also get a glimpse of Elsa’s home life, where her senile father develops a habit of harassing his female caregivers. Elsa, for whom the issue is so black and white at work, offers a nurse more money to stay and ignore as she heads out the door.
Austrian writer-director Kreutzer was inspired to start working on the idea by harrowing reports of a pedophile network in Germany. Then he too found himself uncomfortably close to this situation. Florian Teichtmeister, the leading actor in Empress Elisabeth’s excellent film “Corsage”, was accused and would be found guilty of possessing and producing child sexual abuse images.
Some have criticized “Gentle Monster” for not digging deeper, for not offering any solutions, for pushing the disturbing idea that we are the ones giving bad guys a chance, and perhaps even for suggesting that no man should be trusted.
Even if you walk away from “Gentle Monster” with that gnawing feeling, I don’t think Kreutzer is saying that all men are secret pedophiles or sex troublemakers. The lines blur when it comes to loved ones, and mothers always want to protect their sons.
There’s always that one neighbor who says things like “he’s always been nice to me” or “he was the last person I suspected would do that.” “Gentle Monster” is a film that asks you to question your own complicity, remove the blinders that hide and excuse, and look at our world a little closer. It’s a deconstructed social horror in a small, haunting tone, similar to Lucy’s songs.
Netflix’s movie “Gentle Monster,” which debuts Friday and airs Nov. 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.