Critic's Notebook

Frédéric Batier/Film A-G/Komplizen Film

It has been nearly three years since a federal court ordered the unsealing of the Epstein files, and the country has settled into a posture of exhausted shrugging. Our elected officials have shown little appetite for holding the alleged predators accountable, and the message, repeated until it curdles into wallpaper, is that this is terrible and nothing can be done. That resignation is its own kind of damage. Outrage that never gets answered becomes numbness, and numbness is a luxury only the safe can afford.

Into this climate arrives a small cluster of films willing to wrestle with the sexual abuse of minors, each in a different key. Atom Egoyan’s “Seven Veils,” which premiered in 2023 but only reached U.S. screens in 2025, is the meditative one. Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” is the sensationalist. And now comes Marie Kreutzer’s “Gentle Monster,” a   perhaps intended scorched-earth film that stops short of lighting the match.

Léa Seydoux plays Lucy, an experimental musician riding the high of a sold-out Berlin gig. She, her husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), and their son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet), decamp to the German countryside to get off the grid, partly to nurse Philip’s burnout. The idyll lasts about as long as an echo. Investigators led by Kühn (Jella Haase) appear at the door with a warrant to seize Philip’s devices and storage media. Lucy, blindsided, has to borrow a neighbor’s phone to reach the defense attorney, Lukas (Nils Strunk), because her own has been confiscated.

Philip stands accused of distributing, under the alias GentleMonster_87, a vast cache of files depicting sexualized violence against children. He insists it was research for a documentary. Lucy takes Johnny to her mother, Eloise (Catherine Deneuve), who is kept in the dark and assumes the couple is simply quarreling. Lucy lets her believe it, blaming Johnny for scrambling their sleep. It’s a small lie told in a small voice, the sound of a woman choosing not to rock the boat while the boat takes on water.

Kühn has her own boat. Off duty, she watches her demented father paw at his sitter, Natalia (Patrycja Ziółkowska), and discovers she is capable of exactly the averted gaze she spends her days prosecuting in others. The woman with the badge and the warrant turns out to be a bystander too.

Ms. Kreutzer lingers over these two women’s denials far longer than over anything Philip does or says, and the choice is both the film’s boldest move and its most debatable. Lucy reacts quickly once she knows, but knowing is not the same as acting. She is left trying to reconcile the revelation with the memory of a loving partner and a devoted father, and the film refuses to let her sort evidence from nostalgia. Where “Primetime” flirts with casting its predators as prey, “Gentle Monster” declines to sympathize with them at all. It heads instead into murkier country, where the question is what the people nearest to harm owe everyone else. Was Lucy an enabler all along, standing by her man on a diet of selective memory? Is it too harsh to demand self-scrutiny from someone who is herself collateral damage? Both questions are fair, and the film is honest enough to leave them stinging.

Seen from the present moment, Lucy and Kühn are not so much characters as national-mood emblems with cheekbones. Each has a reason to keep the peace: a marriage, a family, a career, a father. Each is quietly certain that the truth, once spoken, would cost more than it could possibly buy. It is the same arithmetic that lets a country shrug at a sealed-then-unsealed archive of names. Nobody in the film is monstrous enough to defend the crime. They are just tired and can barely manage the fallout.

The method is cold, almost anesthetized, closer in temperature to “Seven Veils” than to anything sensational. Lucy rarely rages in words. Her fury leaks out through music, which makes sense for a character whose livelihood is sound, though it keeps the film at arm’s length from the very feeling it’s courting. Her confrontation with Kühn is a collision rather than a reckoning, and it happens almost by accident. The soundtrack is uneven. Camille, an Oscar winner for “Emilia Pérez,” brings real texture, but the stretches that lean on Coldplay are far less persuasive, a stadium-sized sigh in a film that needs a held breath.

The verdicts Ms. Kreutzer hands down on Lucy and Kühn are pretty damning, and the parallel to our own moment is the film’s sharpest argument: complicity rarely announces itself, and mostly looks like staying quiet at dinner. Yet there is a nagging question about where the camera points. By making two women the face of the averted gaze, “Gentle Monster” risks asking the people with the least power in the room to carry a shame that belongs to the people with the most. Is it the right tree, or merely the nearest one? In a society that has made a civic habit of not rocking the boat, the film offers no way to rock it, only a long, uncomfortable look at who is gripping the rail.