Léa Seydoux plays a woman who faces a terrible question about her husband and their child.
“Gentle Monster”
⭐⭐⭐Rating: 3 out of 4
This rapt emotional burner embeds us with a family that earns our sympathies despite disturbing charges against certain members of the household. When Munich police detectives show up at the country retreat of the Weiss family to collect the husband’s laptop, cellphone and any type of media storage device on the premises, Phillip (Laurence Ruppm), the man under investigation, seems resigned to the incursion. His wife Lucy (Léa Seydoux), however, demands answers—answers that will not come for some time. More troubling, given the implications, is the fact that the couple’s 9-year-old son Johnny (Malo Blanchet) is asleep in a nearby room during the systematic sweep for evidence. (The structure and overtones are strikingly similar to the recently released “Fjord.”)
Pulling back, Lucy and Phillip are kindred artists and idealists who have moved to country to pursue their creative yens. She’s a small hall performance artist somewhere between Laurie Anderson and Lana Del Rey, who takes, breaks and repurposes love ballads written by men, because while men may write them, she says, they don’t feel them. Phillip a bit of a man-boy, is a meandering documentary filmmaker whose projects are constantly starting and stopping — he also suffers from acute panic attacks. Understandably, they have rippling financial pressures — a point that becomes a pivotal bit of key evidence in getting to the truth in this emotionally taut bending of realities.
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