GENTLE MONSTER Trailer Sees Léa Seydoux’s Perfect Family Life Collapses After a Horrifying Discovery
The opening moments of Gentle Monster almost look like they belong to another movie. Grainy home-video footage captures a family enjoying the sort of ordinary happiness people rarely think twice about while they’re living it. Then one unsettling conversation cracks that comfortable picture wide open.
“Darling, I feel that something is wrong.” Soon after, a shirtless man answers a knock at the door and is greeted by police. “We have a warrant. We’d like to come in.” From there, the life this family thought it had begins to collapse.
Léa Seydoux stars in Gentle Monster as Lucy, an experimental pianist who has settled into a rural farmhouse in Bavaria with her husband Philip and their young son. Philip, played by Laurence Rupp, struggles with panic attacks, but the family otherwise appears to have built a loving and peaceful existence together.
That existence is destroyed when a special police unit arrives at their home. Led by Detective Kühn, played by Jella Haase, investigators seize Philip’s devices and discover thousands of child sexual abuse images.
The discovery exposes a secret life Lucy knew nothing about and leaves her confronting the horrifying reality that the husband she loves may be someone completely different from the man she believed him to be.
Rather than approaching the story as a conventional crime thriller, Gentle Monster appears focused on Lucy and the emotional destruction that follows when trust, marriage and family are ripped apart by an unimaginable revelation.
Catherine Deneuve also stars as Lucy’s mother, adding another major name to writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s uncomfortable family drama. The subject matter carries an additional and very personal connection to Kreutzer’s previous work.
In 2022, the Austrian filmmaker released Corsage, which starred Vicky Krieps as 19th-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Florian Teichtmeister as Emperor Franz Joseph I. A year later, Teichtmeister pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography after authorities discovered approximately 76,000 files across 22 devices.
He ultimately received a suspended sentence, a decision that generated considerable outrage in Austria given both the nature of the crimes and Teichtmeister’s standing as a prominent cultural figure.
The scandal also became attached to Corsage, despite having nothing to do with the story Kreutzer had made, and the film was pulled from cinemas.
With Gentle Monster, Kreutzer has taken circumstances resembling elements of the Teichtmeister case and transformed them into fiction, shifting the attention toward the people forced to deal with the devastation caused by someone they trusted.
That real-world history gives the film an uncomfortable weight. Lucy isn’t investigating some mysterious stranger or confronting an obvious villain.
She has to reconcile horrifying evidence with the person she shared her home, marriage and child with. The question becomes what happens to a family when one person’s hidden actions completely rewrite everyone else’s understanding of their own lives.
Gentle Monster premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where Seydoux’s performance and Kreutzer’s handling of the difficult material put the film on the radar.
Netflix acquired the movie as Cannes wrapped in May and has now set its release plans. Gentle Monster will open in limited theaters on October 30 before arriving on Netflix on November 18.
Judging from this first teaser, this could be an incredibly difficult watch, but also a fascinating one.