Cannes 2026 – Gentle Monster: Léa Seydoux imperial in a story that falters

A monster with a sweet face, a family drama against a backdrop of child crime, and the despair of a mother. In official competition, Gentle Monster breaks taboos but does a little too much…

The monsters under our beds do not always take the form we imagine, their appearance is not, contrary to what we see in tales, strange or misshapen: this is what the Austrian director (Bodice) Marie Kreutzer bluntly shows in her sixth feature film, Gentle Monster.

She then stages two intrigues: that of a pianist struggling with despair, when she discovers the true face of her companion and of a cop who must come to terms with that of her father…

GentleMonster_87 is the nickname that the pianist’s husband, Philip, uses to exchange and share child abuse content… Overnight, Lucy’s family life collapses…1821 files… On the computer screen a photo of their shirtless son.

The filmmaker chooses to depict snippets of everyday life which, initially, reveal nothing. A father, a mother and a son who eat dinner, who brush their teeth, who live happily. But in the scenes of common life the nudity of the father is always present, more and more disturbing. Kreutzer subtly establishes this incestual climate. Then the facts arrive with violence, the spectator struggles to believe them. The director immerses us in Lucy’s dismay: torn between her love for this man and the truth which catches up with her.

Léa Seydoux, with her cheekbones red with anger and her mouth contorted with disgust, interprets with sincerity and rage this woman who drifts into a new chaos and takes refuge in the music: she screams her pain at the piano. It is she who carries the film, as intense as in Bruno Dumont’s feature film, Franceor that of Ildikó Enyedi, My wife’s story. The actress finds one of her favorite scores, that of the woman prey to a new pain which overwhelms and engulfs her.

This is the second story, that of the investigator who struggles to take… This gentle monster refers to another: the father of the investigator. If the latter, conscientious in her work, ensures that Lucy does not hide reality under a less dark veil, she distances the truth of her own story… Faced with the “wandering hands” that her father places on his home help, even slipping into his bed at night, Elsa responds: “All you have to do is lock your door“. A story which wants to echo the first but which, by dint of details and length, loses the spectator…

Gentle Monster makes the choice to show a diffuse, domestic and insidious violence, which is lodged in the banality of everyday life. But the characters in this second narrative thread, not developed enough, break the rhythm: the story is diluted in less tense scenes. The coldness of the place contributes to this emotional distance. Léa Seydoux lives in a house invaded by grief, Elsa advances in her father’s clinical labyrinth… While the filmmaker thinks of strengthening her subject with this parallel plot, she weakens it and unbalances the whole.

When the character of Léa Seydoux is no longer there, the scenario no longer responds.

Marie Kreutzer tackles a sensitive subject and succeeds in depicting a monster with a common face. She asks the question: “Would I be able to recognize his face?” But the director breaks the depth of her story by confronting it with a second, less accomplished and less sharp one. Léa Seydoux signs a new performance as an actress, poignant and subtle, in an ambitious but uneven feature film…