Marie Kreutzer and Léa Seydoux on Looking Beyond the Villain Stereotype

“It’s a film that asks questions, nothing more,” says director Marie Kreutzer of her new feature film, Gentle Monster, a disorienting provocateur about truth, denial and never really knowing someone, starring Léa Seydoux

“Look into my eyes, can’t you see they’re open wide?” sings a dirty-blonde-bobbed Léa Seydoux from behind a piano in the opening scene of Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s new feature, Gentle Monster. “Would I lie to you, baby, would I lie to you?” Seydoux plays the French pop-classical musician Lucy Weiss, whose enchanting mezzo-soprano voice is soon interrupted when her partner, Austrian filmmaker Philip (Laurence Rupp), arrives home to their Munich apartment, crumbling to the floor in a panic.

Kreutzer’s film opens as the couple relocate with their young son to Bavaria, seeking a slower pace of life after Philip suffers from burnout. All seems well as the family settle into their spacious farmhouse reno in the verdant German countryside, which becomes the backdrop to an unfolding horror when police detective Elsa (Jella Haase) and a squad of uniformed officers arrive at the door with a search and seizure warrant. After Elsa informs Lucy, who speaks limited German, that Philip has been implicated in a heinous and unthinkable crime, Lucy must grapple with denial, the agony of doubt and the haunting possibility that she may never really have known this man, the father of her child, as she thought.

“Lucy is a really grounded and relatable character,” says Seydoux, talking to AnOther with Kreutzer ahead of the film’s screening at London Film Festival. “They are a very ordinary couple. They’re in love. They still have sex. Everything seems to be perfect on the page, right?” Ordinary and relatable, and in many ways aspirational, was how Kreutzer intended them to be. “Lucy and Philip were written as a combination of real people,” says the director. “I wanted them to be creatives because I relate to that way of living, with that passion for your job but at the same time the insecurity in it. I wanted them to feel like they could be friends of mine.”

Gentle Monster, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival, asks what we are willing to believe about the people we love, spotlighting the disconcerting capacity a person has to be good and bad – gentle and monstrous – at once. “That’s what the film is about for me, that people are not only one thing,” says Kreutzer. “A good person can be a bad person, too. And the worst people can be people we trust, or at least, think we can trust. We view a perpetrator as someone distant from us, never close to us, and we can be quick to judge, to only see darkness, to only see the bad. But when that perpetrator is close to us, if it’s someone we know, it’s much more complicated. That person is certainly a bad person, but he, Philip, has sides that Lucy can love, sides she thought she knew.”  

Kreutzer, whose 2022 historical drama Corsage, about the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, received critical acclaim, here holds up a magnifying glass to the simple distinctions we give to both perpetrators and victims. “In fiction, it’s easier to see the bad guy and the good guy definitively, without ambiguity,” Kreutzer says. “In real life, it’s not black and white like that.” She critiques the stereotypes we use to imagine what a villain might look like as a means of distancing them from ourselves. “Often the perpetrators are people we know,” says Seydoux. Those with the greatest capacity to harm us can be those closest to us.

The film confronts the unequivocally condemnable while inviting viewers to consider the complexities that orbit it. The idea for the story came to Kreutzer in 2020, when she read about a police investigation into child sex abuse in a German newspaper. The subject later became more personal when an actor she had worked with was charged with possession of child pornography, only fuelling the urgency of the story. Her experience offered her unique insight for the character she was writing. “At first I felt like I couldn’t go on making Gentle Monster because it would always be associated with this case,” Kreutzer said previously. “But it didn’t take long before I realised that this was precisely why I had to – and wanted to – make this film.”

At no point in the film does Kreutzer reproduce images of abuse. Likewise, Lucy never witnesses the very thing her partner has been accused of. Instead, it exists for her and the audience to imagine, adding to the terror while inflating space for doubt. “Without the imagery, just your imagination, it’s very powerful,” says Seydoux, whose agents were apprehensive as to whether she should take the role, considering the film’s sensitive nature. “I was scared to read it at first. My agents said, ‘It’s a beautiful script but you have kids,’ and I thought maybe not, but I was moved to tears when I read it and I fell in love with Lucy. There was no question about it, I had to do it.” 

The story is observed through Lucy’s perspective, through her shock and isolation, her denial. “I like that it’s told this way, not via the perpetrator, or the victim; it’s very much [about] how Lucy reacts, and how she deals with all these contradictory emotions,” says Seydoux. The severity of her secret prevents her from feeling like she can talk to friends and family. Lucy lives in a country that isn’t her own and must deal with the authorities in broken German. “She’s a foreigner, she’s away from her home country and she has to deal with this terrible thing in secret,” says Seydoux. “Linguistically, she can’t express her pain, which is very isolating.” 

Philip’s own denial soon morphs into excuses and lies – “This isn’t what it seems, Lucy,” he says – which Lucy wants desperately to believe. “I love you so much it hurts,” she says, paralysed in a fraught no-man’s-land between what she hopes to be true and what the evidence suggests to be true. Her mother (Catherine Denueve), who at first she cannot tell, insists she severs ties. But Lucy finds she cannot simply turn her feelings off at will, even when the relationship becomes impossible to sustain.

“I’ve had traumas in my life,” says Seydoux, “but never something as terrible as this. I don’t know how I would have reacted, honestly, but I had an immense empathy for the character, and I think a lot of that was due to how Marie wrote her.” Seydoux’s performance is extraordinary, and her preparation for the part was practical – she took piano and singing lessons, and learned German phonetically. “Léa has this unpredictability with timing; there’s something very mysterious about her,” says Kreutzer. “I always say that casting is very intuitive and emotional, and that’s what I felt with Léa – she’s unique.”

Kreutzer hopes her audience won’t have gone through what Lucy experiences in the film, but recognises that on some level everyone will have been disappointed by someone, lied to, manipulated, dishonest with oneself, or wrong about who a person really was. “I want people to engage and to feel something, to question their own stereotypes, to go with their gut a little more. [...] We’ve all heard – or maybe even spoken – the sentence ‘he could never do that’,” says Kreutzer. “We have so many things programmed in our head by society, by our own worst fears, that can we end up missing things.”

Gentle Monster releases in select UK cinemas on 30 October and streams on Netflix UK from 18 November