Léa Seydoux's married a Gentle Monster in scandal-inspired drama

On January 13, 2023, exactly three weeks after Austrian director Marie Kreutzer released her cheeky historical fiction film Corsage in the U.S., one of the principal actors made headlines over heinous accusations brought against him. Florian Teichtmeister, who starred opposite Vicky Krieps, was charged with possession of child pornography. Police found over 76,000 files dated between 2008 and 2021 stashed among his personal devices, resulting in him eventually being arraigned and sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence in September of 2023. These events loosely inspired Kreutzer’s follow-up film, Gentle Monster.

Gentle Monster centers on concert pianist Lucy (Léa Seydoux), whose relationship implodes after authorities show up to her German countryside estate with a warrant to seize her husband Philip’s (Laurence Rupp) electronics, suspecting the distribution of sexually explicit videos of children. Adding an extra layer of psychological torment is the fact that the two have a young son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet), who may or may not appear in some of the illicit content. What follows is a heavy yet mundane investigation—the bureaucratic banality of which is exemplified by the plot occasionally shifting to a female officer (Jella Haase) handling the case—and a handful of flashbacks that, now that the crime has come to light, hint at Philip’s suspicious behavior some years prior.

While Lucy is portrayed as being completely blindsided, the same may not be entirely true of  Kreutzer and the broader Austrian film industry; indeed, on the night of Corsage‘s 2022 premiere, director Katharina Mückstein posted about her dismay that a predator would be “applauded” on stage that evening. In turn, a steady stream of women posted their personal accounts of misogyny and abuse in the Austrian film industry, essentially spearheading a fresh national MeToo reckoning. At the time, Kreutzer bristled at the idea of distancing herself from the then-unnamed actor over mere “rumors,” yet less than six months later they turned out to be legally substantiated.

All of this is to say that Gentle Monster certainly seems like it would be Kreutzer’s attempt to face this all head-on, but the film doesn’t truly reckon with any of the repercussions that might arise from such a crime. Sure, the once-happy family is thrust into dysfunction, but there’s no real provocation—not on the part of the characters or the filmmaker herself. Any inclination to interrogate why is met with rote psychological assertions: Emasculated or “frustrated” men might find themselves drawn to easily exploited targets, and sexual assault is about power, not attraction, after all. And for all of the queasiness that the idea of child sexual assault conjures, there is no genuine effort to understand the motivations of abusers—and, perhaps most pertinently, the predatory culture that can embolden such urges.