‘Gentle Monster’ Trailer: Léa Seydoux Learns Her Husband is into Seriously Disturbing Stuff in Clunky Cannes Drama

The trailer for Marie Kreutzer’s “Gentle Monster” dropped today, giving us our first real look at the fall release that premiered at Cannes. Netflix surprisingly picked up the film after its premiere, clearly seeing Léa Seydoux as an awards-season possibility. I’m not entirely convinced.

I thought I’d already written something about this film out of Cannes, but turns out my review has been sitting in draft this entire time. Go figure.

Seydoux plays Lucy, a concert pianist whose husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), is arrested after police discover he has been accessing and distributing child sexual abuse material. Suddenly, Lucy is forced to confront the possibility that she never really knew the man she married—or what their young son may have been exposed to.

Kreutzer wisely keeps Philip mostly offscreen and stays with Lucy as she tries to process what’s happened. Jella Haase plays the investigator, but her subplot involving her troubled relationship with her father is clunky and, frankly, feels unnecessary.

There’s a good movie buried somewhere in “Gentle Monster.” The premise is certainly provocative, but Kreutzer’s screenplay is far too schematic, repeatedly underlining its themes of denial, and guilt instead of trusting the material to speak for itself. By the end, it feels like the film is trying much harder to make a point than to tell a compelling story.

Seydoux, however, is terrific—as she almost always is. She brings a vulnerability to Lucy that the film itself doesn’t quite deserve. If anything, Seydoux is rarely the problem as she tends to make her movies better. She broke out with the Palme d’Or-winning “Blue Is the Warmest Color” and has since built an impressive filmography with directors like David Cronenberg, Wes Anderson, Denis Villeneuve, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Bertrand Bonello.

“Gentle Monster” hits select theaters October 30 and Netflix November 18.