Austrian director Marie Kreutzer premiered Gentle Monster, a drama centred on the wife of a man charged with possessing child pornography, in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, on May 15. The film stars French actress Léa Seydoux and German actress Jella Haase, with French legend Catherine Deneuve in a supporting role. It is an Austria-Germany-France co-production running 114 minutes.
The film follows Lucy Weiss, a singer-pianist played by Seydoux, whose life unravels after police arrive at her home and confiscate her husband Philip’s computer and phone. According to Cineuropa, an explanation is soon provided: child pornography. Lucy, who has a young son with Philip, flees the house they have just bought and begins constructing a series of lies to conceal what she now knows.
Kreutzer told Variety the project began with journalism, not personal experience. “I read a newspaper article about the subject in 2020, and it was a very good piece of journalism, a long article, and very explicit,” she said. “It stayed with me, and I just felt like I had to do something, and the only thing I can do is tell a story about it.”
The film’s arrival at Cannes was complicated by real-world events. In early 2023, as Kreutzer’s previous film Corsage was in full awards contention, the Austrian actor Florian Teichtmeister — one of its lead performers — was charged with possession of child pornography and later pleaded guilty. Kreutzer had already been writing the script for Gentle Monster at the time.
She told Variety she considered abandoning the project entirely. “It was crazy, and when we had the scandal and the shitstorm, and it became really difficult, I felt like, ‘Okay, I can’t do this film anymore because everyone would always connect it [with the Teichtmeister case].'” She said she quickly reversed that thinking: “then it didn’t take very long until I realized, ‘No, that’s maybe not a good reason to not make the film, it’s maybe even more of a reason [for me to make it].'”
The film’s central argument is about social denial. Kreutzer told Variety the conversations she wants viewers to have should focus on honesty and the instinct to look away. “A word that came up often during the research was ‘shame.’ It’s shame that makes us look away; it’s shame that makes us not confront this,” she said. “In personal relationships, but also as a society.”
The title itself encodes this argument. Perpetrators, Kreutzer said, are not who most people imagine them to be. “It’s not the creepy guy behind the bush. It could be your partner, your friend, your father, someone you know, who you trust and you like … a cool guy,” she told Variety.
A secondary storyline reinforces this. Police officer Elsa Kühn, played by Haase, handles the investigation into Philip while separately failing to confront her own father’s sexual harassment of his live-in nurse, according to The Film Stage. Kreutzer told Variety the two narratives mirror each other deliberately: “All of the women in the film are basically trying to fix the lives of the men they live with.” The sub-plot shows that even professionals in this field can “look the other way if it makes our lives easier,” she said.
Deneuve plays Lucy’s mother Eloise, a woman without a significant man in her life who has long pushed her daughter toward independence. “She is someone who has always made her own decisions, and who knew what she wanted, and where she wanted to go,” Kreutzer told Variety. “She is a strong mother, with very clear views on things, which she doesn’t shy away from telling her daughter.”
Kreutzer also identified structural power dynamics as a root cause. The vast majority of those who commit these crimes are men, she said, and she connected this to how boys are raised. “Why is it always around power? What do we tell [boys] when they are growing up? Why is power such an important thing for them?,” she asked, according to Variety.
Cineuropa described Gentle Monster as the scariest film shown at Cannes so far this year, calling it a drama that poses deeply uncomfortable questions. The Film Stage said both Seydoux and Haase portray women who perform a kind of emotional restraint — suppressing rage in order to spare the men around them.
Gentle Monster is Kreutzer’s first appearance in the Cannes main competition, having previously shown Corsage in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, according to Screen Daily. The festival’s official selection, reported by Cineuropa, lists 22 films competing for the Palme d’Or, five of which were directed by women. International sales for the film are handled by mk2 Films, according to the Cannes official selection. Producers are Alexander Glehr and Johanna Scherz at Vienna-based Film AG, with co-producers Komplizen Film of Germany and Kazak Productions of France.
The film’s subject matter places it within a broader public debate across Europe. The Teichtmeister case in 2023 triggered a national reckoning in Austria over how the arts community and the public handled knowledge of allegations against a celebrated performer before they became public, according to Variety’s reporting at the time.
The Cannes jury will deliberate on all 22 competition films before the closing ceremony on May 23, when the Palme d’Or and other awards will be announced. No distributor for Gentle Monster in English-language markets has been confirmed. Kreutzer has said she hopes audiences engage with the film as a question about personal and collective honesty rather than as a film primarily about crime.
