‘Gentle Monster’ Review: Léa Seydoux Brings Gravity to a Harrowing End-of-Family Drama
Variety | 16.05.2026 05:20
It is ironic, in a film of precious little irony, that Marie Kreutzer‘s intelligently made but unremittingly bleak “Gentle Monster” — the Austrian director’s Cannes competition-selected follow-up to her Un Certain Regard prizewinner “Corsage” — should not only begin and end with a trampoline, but should to some degree pivot on the uncomplicatedly happy image of a little boy somersaulting and bouncing on it. Plotting a linear, sinking trajectory, Kreutzer’s discomfiting film describes no such buoyant highs and lows. Here, what goes up must come down and down and still further down.
