Marie Kreutzer makes films about women held in place by family and expectation, and she keeps the camera on the woman rather than on what she sees. Given one idea and one performance she is at her best; given two of each, she wavers.
Fi1m perspective
When something happens to a woman in a Marie Kreutzer film, the camera does not cut to it. It stays on her face and lets the news arrive there. In Gentle Monster (2026) Léa Seydoux opens the door to the police and learns that her husband has been arrested, and Kreutzer and her cinematographer Judith Kaufmann hold on Seydoux rather than on the officers, so we learn what has happened by watching it land. It is a plain choice and a demanding one, because it needs an actress who can carry a scene with nothing to react to, and Kreutzer keeps finding them.
She trained as a screenwriter in Vienna, worked in shorts and television, and made her first feature, The Fatherless, in 2011. The films that followed, Gruber Is Leaving (2015), We Used to Be Cool (2016) and The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019), circle the same ground: women hemmed in by family, work or what is expected of them, and pushing back. The Ground Beneath My Feet, about a woman in a demanding job hiding a family responsibility from the people she works with, was the clearest early sign of what she could do with a single performance under strain. Corsage (2022), made with Vicky Krieps, took the same method to an empress and became her breakthrough abroad. It kept one woman in the centre of the frame for two hours and dared us to look away.
She writes her own scripts and works with the same people: Kaufmann on two films, the editor Ulrike Kofler on two, Krieps on two. That steadiness shows in the performances, which are the best thing in every film she has made. It also shows in her tone, which is drier than the subjects suggest; she has said that even in her serious films she likes to create some laughter, and she means it. The weakness is structure. Gentle Monster has a hard and proper subject, a wife who will not believe what she has been told about the man she loves, and for an hour Kreutzer refuses her every comfort. We felt sick, in the right way, and admired the film for it. Then she adds a second story, and by the last half hour we had stopped feeling sick and started feeling managed, because the film kept leaving Seydoux for something less good.
So there are two Kreutzer films: the one that trusts a woman for the whole length, and the one that keeps looking for somewhere else to be. Seydoux is reason enough to watch Gentle Monster, and Kreutzer is the reason it is not better. She is at her best when she stays put.
Biography
Marie Kreutzer is an Austrian film director and screenwriter. Born in Graz in 1977, she studied screenwriting and dramaturgy at the Vienna Film Academy under Walter Wippersberg.
Her feature films include The Fatherless (2011), The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019) and Corsage (2022), the last of which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. She wrote and directed Gentle Monster (2026), which screened in competition at Cannes.
