“Would I Lie to You?” is the first question “Gentle Monster” asks. Sitting at her piano, Lucy (Léa Seydoux) sings the Charles & Eddie classic in a stripped-back version that feels less like a love song than a question. It is a fitting introduction to Marie Kreutzer’s unsettling drama, where trust and doubt gradually become impossible to separate.

Lucy, a French concert pianist, has moved with her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp), a filmmaker, and their young son Johnny (Malo Blanchet) from Munich to the German countryside. Their quiet new life is interrupted when police officer Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase) arrives and confiscates Philip’s digital devices. He is accused of the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material. As Lucy tries to understand what has happened, Philip offers explanations that gradually prove to be lies, forcing her to question the person she thought she knew, and leaving her with the lingering uncertainty of whether Johnny was affected.

Philip is used to looking at the world through a camera, documenting his surroundings and his family. Now, his footage becomes impossible to look at in quite the same way. Why did he record these things? Was it innocent, or was there another intention behind it? Once suspicion enters the room, even familiar images can suddenly seem to mean something entirely different. The film finds its tension in the space between what Lucy believes, what she fears and what she can actually know.

Alongside Lucy’s story, Kreutzer follows Elsa, the investigator handling Philip’s case. At work, she deals with sexual violence and crimes against children; at home, she regularly visits her father Hermann (Sylvester Groth), who is living with dementia and behaves sexually abusively towards his caregiver. Both women find themselves confronted with abuse within relationships that are difficult to simply leave behind.

Starring Léa Seydoux, Jella Haase, Laurence Rupp, Catherine Deneuve and Malo Blanchet, “Gentle Monster” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. A French-German-Austrian production set against the bleak scenery of the German countryside, the film explores the fragile foundations of trust and how quickly the image we have built of another person can begin to fall apart. “Gentle Monster” is in German cinemas from 17 September.

England in the 14th century: a devastating wave of plague has wiped out large parts of the population. The people suffer under an oppressive tax burden and social injustice. Anger and despair over the tyrannical rule of the young King Richard II. spread further and further across the country.

The simple peasant Ploughman (Andrew Garfield) has lost his entire family during the plague and now finds himself at the center of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, joining a group of rebels. They are led by Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and the charismatic preacher John Ball (Jamie Bell), who call on the people to resist the Crown. Together, the rebels march on London, where the fury over the corrupt rulers erupts in brutal fighting. The young king seems hopelessly overwhelmed by his furious people and manipulated by his consultants. Faced with the escalating violence, he finds himself forced to show a willingness to negotiate.

What follows is a brutal, bloody fight for justice, with plenty of victims on both sides of the battlefield. Ploughman, right at the front, is confronted with the conflicting views of different groups within the revolt. As Alyce, another marcher, rightfully puts it on their way to London: “All will be well once the poison of wealth is removed.” – but after that is removed, it continues, of course, and therefore becomes a drastic depiction of humanity’s insatiable desire for power in all its absurdity and brutality.

Entirely filmed in Germany’s Bavaria, thanks to the many historically accurate villages that still exist there, the set is highly realistic of British medieval villages and sucks the viewer right into this frugal past. Leaving the cinema to the noises and bright light of the 21st century feels almost disorienting after all the dark horrors depicted for the past 128 minutes.

Amidst the millions of lives unfolding daily in Berlin, a particularly painful one unfolds for 16-year-old Ilay. His mother is on her deathbed, accompanied only by her son and the caretakers Ana and Shanti.

Viewers hoping for more of a conventional plot must soon let go of that expectation, as director Saša Vajda seems intent on playing with the concept of time, capturing the standstill of time in the face of death.

Ilay balances his life between multiple jobs, seeing his friends, and boxing as an outlet. Other than that, he does not disclose much to the audience. With Ilay rarely speaking, judgement can only be formed through his actions. The slow shots and 16mm cinematography leave plenty of room to observe the characters’ relationships – and they feel especially authentic. Vajda cast teenagers from the streets, allowing them to use their own jargon, making it almost feel like hanging out with them rather than only observing. Their chattiness and eagerness to live only further highlight Ilay’s silence. Suffering from insomnia, he wanders sleepless through his life, doing everything he is expected to do while seeming far, far detached from it.

Casted caretaker Ana is an actual ICU nurse, and her movements and interactions feel grounded in her day-to-day experience, as does her understanding of the pain felt by family members. She is also the one encouraging Ilay to seek help for his mental wellbeing. His visits to the therapist seem to go nowhere: he fails to explain his feelings, only mentioning that he is “in the wrong time,” like “a ghost who is present and not present at the same time.”

Completely dissociated in his pain and helplessness, Ilay seems unreachable. He barely interacts with anyone, whether it is his sick mother or the concerned caretaker Ana.

This creates a sense of blurred uncertainty about where the plot is heading, leaving the audience in a strange waiting room between life and death. Confusing or frustrating to some, this may very well have been Vajda’s exact intention.

One of the most frightful yet weirdly comforting concepts about life might be the fact that it will always continue. Waves will hit the same shores they hit hundreds of years ago, work and school and daily life will continue whilst seasons quietly change. No matter who leaves today, the sun will rise again tomorrow, in this case over Berlin, illuminating the little lives of nearly four million people. For one person, however, life ends at the very start of this summer day.

The last picture in her camera roll remains this image of the sun, which becomes the merciless key element of the following 97 minutes. Jessie leaves behind her mother Ella, her younger sister Melli, and Lux, the only person present at the moment of the tragedy.

What follows for this unusual trio is learning to live despite the overwhelming question: How can the sun rise again after something like this happens? How can we keep on living?

The quiet star of this movie is definitely Birgit Minichmayr, delivering an incredibly moving portrait of a mother in agony, who nevertheless manages to keep up with the routines of everyday life, if only for the sake of her other daughter, Melli. Fights about who gets a room to themselves have long since become irrelevant for Melli, as she is now struggling through a life without her big sister. Lux, who is more or less directly blamed for the accident, finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the remaining family, and they soon form a community of shared fate despite their complex dynamics.

Against all odds, the three travel to Tenerife together, each on their own desperate journey to grasp what has happened. It is here that, slowly but surely, a new, fragile form of afterlife carves itself out for the three characters – somewhere between closure and distance, blame and forgiveness, standstill and movement.

DOP Gregory Oke, perhaps best known for his work in “Aftersun“, manages to capture the painful beauty of life after loss through physical, dreamlike images. Extended sound design, intimate conversations, and the film’s multimedia approach create an almost otherworldly, dissociative viewing experience, demonstrating yet again how indifferent life is in the face of tragedy. Or, as director Sandra Wollner put it: “The feeling that, after a tragedy, the world ought to come to a standstill. But it doesn’t. The sun still rises, a garbage truck flashes its indicator without a care, and everyone goes about their daily lives. Life doesn’t have the decency to pause when something terrible happens.”