May 15, 2026 3:20pm PT

‘Gentle Monster’ Review: Léa Seydoux Brings Gravity to a Harrowing End-of-Family Drama

The French actress ably embodies the anguish of a wife and mother reeling from the revelation of her partner's involvement in a child pornography ring in director Marie Kreutzer's grimly persuasive follow-up to the superb 'Corsage.'

Jessica Kiang

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Jessica Kiang

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Courtesy of MK2, Frédéric Batier, Cannes Film Festival

It is ironic, in a film of precious little irony, that Marie Kreutzer‘s intelligently made but unremittingly bleak “Gentle Monster” — the Austrian director’s Cannes competition-selected follow-up to her Un Certain Regard prizewinner “Corsage” — should not only begin and end with a trampoline, but should to some degree pivot on the uncomplicatedly happy image of a little boy somersaulting and bouncing on it. Plotting a linear, sinking trajectory, Kreutzer’s discomfiting film describes no such buoyant highs and lows. Here, what goes up must come down and down and still further down.