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Jodie Foster grants grown-up whodunit A Private Life an elegant gravity

It revolves around a death, but filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski's movie unspools like a date-night confection for the arthouse crowd.

By Tim Grierson  |  January 12, 2026 | 6:00am
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics
Film Reviews Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster grants grown-up whodunit A Private Life an elegant gravity

Jodie Foster so rarely stars in movies these days that it’s a pleasure to see her in A Private Life. But it’s even more enjoyable to simply watch her listen. She does that a lot in French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski’s classy, curious whodunit, in which she plays Lilian, an American psychiatrist who has lived in Paris for many years. Lilian’s job is to listen to her clients, but after one of them dies under odd circumstances, she decides to become an amateur sleuth to investigate what really happened. A Private Life is as much a thriller as it is a character study, also making room for a romantic drama and even elements of dark comedy. It’s an unwieldy mix, but Foster’s quiet, observant character forms its strong center. She keeps you wondering what Lilian is thinking when she’s not talking.

The client in question is Paula (Virginie Efira), a mother and wife who has been in treatment with Lilian for almost a decade. Suddenly, though, Paula misses three straight sessions, which leaves Lilian concerned. Eventually, Paula’s daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) delivers the bad news: Paula died by suicide, overdosing on the medication Lilian prescribed her. Lilian is shocked—Paula had never shown signs of suicidal ideation—and after meeting the chilly Valérie and Paula’s volcanic husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric), she starts to suspect that Paula didn’t take her own life. Perhaps one of Paula’s family members murdered her?

It’s a wild hypothesis, but Zlotowski takes Lilian’s hunch seriously, daringly striking a tricky tonal balance that allows the movie to be both a fun caper and a melancholy meditation. As a result, A Private Life offers plenty of fizzy pleasures alongside somber reflections on the passage of time and the regrets you have to live with. 

The filmmaker’s previous movie was 2022’s Other People’s Children, which starred Efira as a single middle-aged teacher taking another chance on love, and Zlotowski again invests in a complicated, solitary heroine. Fluent in French but still something of a proud outsider—during one amusing interlude, she curses her fellow Parisians for just how damn French they are—Lilian lives a modest, somewhat fastidious existence. Obsessively recording each of her therapy sessions on old-school minidiscs that she carefully catalogs, Lilian has an adult son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), and grandson she rarely sees. As for her ophthalmologist ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), Lilian only pays him a visit once she notices that her eyes are leaking—she’s not crying, but her eyes keep watering like she is. A Private Life is far from the first film about a shrink who discovers that she understands much less about human behavior than she realizes, but Foster’s graceful, muted performance keeps hinting at the depths of discontent that reside uncharted within Lilian, just waiting to reach the surface.

As Lilian begins to pursue her belief that Paula was killed, she recruits Gabriel to be a Watson to her Holmes, and soon the former lovers are back in each other’s orbit for the first time in too long. Lord knows the spark between them is still there—an initial drunken reunion at a restaurant leads to them going to bed—and Foster and Auteuil exude a wonderfully sexy, grown-up chemistry. A Private Life may be about a heinous crime, but the film unspools like a date-night confection for the arthouse crowd. 

But for all its hints of urban sophistication, this good-looking yet flimsy movie can be awfully silly, with Zlotowski introducing airport-novel gimmicks into the script she co-wrote—most notably, a scene in which Lilian meets a hypnotist, which results in a hokey fantasy sequence that may or may not hold a key to Paula’s death. One senses that Zlotowski relishes weaving in these obviously cheesy elements, inviting the audience to savor a little hokum delivered with a straight face by Foster and a distinguished international cast. 

It doesn’t take a master detective to deduce that, ultimately, A Private Life isn’t so concerned with the mystery’s outcome. In truth, Paula’s death is one gigantic MacGuffin meant to awaken something in Lilian, a dedicated psychiatrist who only slowly comes to recognize that she has fallen into a stupor. Admittedly, there’s an undeniable glibness to crafting a whodunit involving a murdered woman who ends up being grist for a diverting, superficial yarn. Nonetheless, working with frequent cinematographer George Lechaptois, Zlotowski frames Foster as an enigmatic figure of impossible cool, placing her in an apartment building with incredible winding staircases and dressing her in flowing scarves and chic sunglasses. The two-time Oscar-winner does the rest, playing Lilian as someone who is always at a slight remove. Perhaps that’s something Lilian has learned in her work—as much as a psychiatrist cares about her patients, she needs to maintain some distance—but over time it appears to have affected her personal life as well. 

At its core, A Private Life is built around a cliché—the intellectually imposing individual who must open up—but Foster makes the trope alluring. As a performer, she has often essayed characters battling self-doubt on the way to proving themselves. Recently turned 63, Foster is now perfectly positioned to play accomplished women with more life behind them than in front. When we first meet Lilian, though, she doesn’t want to face that reality—it’s easier to listen to her clients than to the voices inside her demanding to be heard. A Private Life‘s mystery may underwhelm, but Lilian manages to solve something far more important. Foster cracks that case elegantly.

Director: Rebecca Zlotowski
Writers: Anne Berest, Rebecca Zlotowski, Gaëlle Macé 
Starring: Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira, Mathieu Amalric, Vincent Lacoste, Luàna Bajrami
Release Date: January 16, 2026 

 
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