Gentle Monster review – disquieting drama about two women facing the truth about the men they love

Cannes film festival: Léa Seydoux is a wife and mother whose life unravels when police arrive to quiz her husband; Jella Haase is a detective dealing with her ailing father’s misdeeds

Marie Kreutzer is the Austrian director who created impressive and stylish pictures such as the psychological thriller The Ground Beneath My Feet and the Habsburg biopic Corsage. Now she brings us this coldly eloquent and disquieting Franco-German drama about two women who find themselves imprisoned by a duty of care and loyalty to the men in their lives. One discovers something terrible about her husband and immediately goes into a state of negotiated denial, the other loves her demanding job as a police officer, and is all the more dependent on the live-in cleaner/care worker who looks after her difficult elderly father.

Léa Seydoux plays the first, Lucy Weiss, a French musician who has built up an enthusiastic, though niche following for her experimental pop-classical hybrid performances. Her mother, played in cameo by Catherine Deneuve, was a more conventionally successful concert pianist. Lucy has a comfortable home in Munich with her German TV director husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), and their lively nine-year-old son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet). But Philip has had a breakdown, collapsing sobbing in Lucy’s arms, apparently due to overwork and drug problems. She agrees to move to the countryside to soothe his emotional pain, and for a while things look better. Philip is evidently devoted to Johnny, playfully filming him and Lucy for some little personal project, and manfully building his son a trampoline in the garden.