Gentle Monster is in limited theatrical release now and debuts on Netflix on Nov. 18.

A deeply unsettling drama, Marie Kreutzer’s Cannes premiere Gentle Monster follows a family living in the aftermath of disturbing allegations and the related moral compromises of the investigating officer. When her husband’s hard drives are seized on suspicion of child sexual abuse material (or child pornography), a French mother living near Munich tumbles down a rabbit hole of sharply penetrating uncertainties as the movie slowly folds in on itself, nudging you to question how you read its characters and their claims.

The film begins unassumingly, with musician Lucy Weiss (Léa Seydoux) comforting her German filmmaker husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) during his nervous breakdown; his burnout sees them moving to the suburbs sometime later. This introduction, along with tender scenes of Lucy and Philip raising their middle school-aged son Johnny (Malo Blanchet) in the lush countryside, endear us to this seemingly ordinary family and place us right in Lucy’s shoes as a woman with no reason to question her summery domestic bliss.

The inviting atmosphere is interrupted by an arriving German task force led by the stern, straightforward Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase), whose unit seizes Philip’s devices and asks him to follow them to their police station if he so chooses, with a lawyer by his side. Philip’s nervous reaction indicates he might know exactly why they have a warrant, but the shell-shocked Lucy is left to put the pieces of his charges together from information she gleans along the way, leading to startling scenes of silent reactions which make for powerful connective tissue.

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