There is a warning at the start of this film that it contains references to child sexual abuse and so you know it is going to be potentially a tough watch.

Lucy (Léa Seydoux) is a successful contemporary musician, super happy with her handsome husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) and their precocious and joyful son Johnny (Malo Blanchet). They have just moved to a big house in the countryside, prompted it seems by Philip having some kind of emotional breakdown due to work stress.

All seems idyllic until there is a knock at the door and there are many police officers wanting to see Philip’s computer, phone and hard drives. Lucy is blindsided, and there is a very powerful moment where she presses the button in the lift to go up to the detective’s office and sees that it is the sexual and violent crimes against children division, realising for the first time what is happening.

The guts of the story is around Lucy trying to find out what the truth is, struggling between wanting to believe Philip is innocent but suspecting he is not. The need to protect her son is paramount, although he shows no outward signs of being traumatised.

We see the internal struggle, the wish to hide the information from other people, her denials, her pushing Philip away and then the very slow revealing of what might be the truth. There is also a small role for Catherine Deneuve as Lucy’s mother. This is the second film of the festival that had more or less cameo from Deneuve (Parallel Tales being the other one).

As a counterpoint, we get glimpses of the private life of the lead detective Elsa (Jella Haase). She has a father living in his own home with dementia, with a full-time nurse who he periodically mistreats and occasionally assaults. I don’t know if it’s coincidental that Elsa and Lucy look pretty similar – this might be a motif to show two sides of the issue, both the people immediately affected, and the dispassionate police trying to right wrongs.

There are some really well played aha moments, and I think director Marie Kreutzer (who also made Corsage (2022)) does a good job at showing ambiguity and how abuse can hide in plain sight – the gentle monster.

I’m not sure that we really needed the depth of Elsa’s backstory, it was interesting but probably pushed out the length of the film without adding much other than a pivotal scene where Elsa seems to do what she accuses others of. It distracts from what seems to be the more important narrative.

Seydoux is really great in this role, she has an expressive face and is believable as someone whose life has been upended. You can’t help but wonder who you would be in this situation.

In writing this review, I discovered the following trivia from IMDb that can’t be ignored although there are some assertions here that may be more nuanced:

‘Gentle Monster’ addresses a subject similar to the pedophilia case involving actor Florian Teichtmeister that shocked Austria in 2023. Its director, Marie Kreutzer, cast Teichtmeister as the male lead in her earlier work, Corsage (2022). While promoting the film, Kreutzer stressed the importance of believing abuse victims. Yet when Teichtmeister denied the allegations against him in 2021, she chose to believe him and proceeded with the release of ‘Corsage’. He was later convicted of possessing child pornography in 2023 and received a two-year suspended sentence.