‘Gentle Monster’ Trailer: Léa Seydoux Faces the Horrific in Marie Kreutzer’s Child Abuse Drama

The Cannes favorite sees Seydoux in one of the most demanding roles of her career.

“I love to express things without words,” Léa Seydoux told our own Anne Thompson at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. In Marie Kreutzer’s “Gentle Monster,” which premiered at the festival this May, the actress plays a character who allowed her to, in her own words, “discover the story as it unfolds … through her perspective, and she has to face all these different emotions. She doesn’t want to be in denial. I had to express so many contradictory feelings.”

And the film offers some serious denial for Seydoux to play with. We’ll let the film’s official logline take it away: “When a police raid shatters her life, concert pianist Lucy (Léa Seydoux) must protect her son and confront how little she knows her husband after he is accused of an unspeakable crime in this tense thriller about trust and survival.”

The film’s newest trailer doesn’t give too much away, instead (wisely) focusing on Seydoux’s stricken expressions as things get steadily worse as still more is revealed. Pay attention for a brief shot of her Lucy looking utterly bereft in an elevator, a quick cut from one of the film’s most transfixing reveals.

Out of Cannes, David Ehrlich wrote that “among other things, this tough and unflinching social drama is a study in how painful it can be for a rhetorical question — like ‘Would I lie to you, baby?,’ for example — to sour into the stomach-churning stuff of an urgent mystery. For the terms of a relationship to change faster than the facts of the matter are able to keep up with, let alone the feelings that might attend to them. ‘There is no “off button” for pedophilia,’ someone explains to Lucy at one point. There isn’t an ‘off button’ for love either.”

The film is Kreutzer’s first film after her critically acclaimed film “Corsage,” which was Austria’s submission for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards. The film also stars Jella Haase, Laurence Rupp, and Academy Award nominee Catherine Deneuve.

“Gentle Monster” opens in select theaters on Friday, October 30 before streaming on Netflix on November 18. Watch the film’s newest trailer below.