Marie Kreutzer’s “Gentle Monster” is a study in anguish. Lucy (Léa Seydoux) is a musician, living with her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) and their young son Johnny (Malo Blanchet) in a crumbling but sprawling European country home wreathed in ivy; it’s a relocation, where they hope for a fresh start after Philip’s struggles with anxiety. (It isn’t quite clear exactly where they live, though it’s somewhere in Germany/Austria/France; all the characters speak a fascinating mixture of German, French and English, sometimes changing languages midsentence.) One day, just minutes into the movie, several police officers show up at the door, strangely calm and quiet, and methodically take away Philip’s digital equipment. When Lucy learns the reason — her husband is accused of possessing and dealing in child sexual abuse material, on a large scale — she is briefly unable to speak, her face seeming to dissolve into nothingness before our eyes.

This is no easy peg on which to hang a movie, and to be sure, “Gentle Monster” is no easy watch (though we see no children in peril). But Kreutzer (whose previous film was the Austrian period drama “Corsage”) here has a performer who can carry us through. Seydoux has a fascinatingly changeable face — she can look her age (early 40s) or much, much younger — and everything Lucy experiences flickers through that face. We watch as she gazes at her son in horror, anguished by his vulnerability; we see as she desperately listens to Philip’s lies and tries to believe them; we listen as she shouts desperately, “Make it go away!” through tears, wanting back the life where none of this existed.

It’s a remarkable performance inside a movie that can be uneven when Seydoux is offscreen. Catherine Deneuve plays Lucy’s mother Eloise, to whose home Lucy and Johnny flee when the news breaks, and you spend the entire film waiting for a great Deneuve scene that never comes — why cast a legend and give her so little to do? Conversely, much time is given to the home life of the stoic lead detective on the case, Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase), and while there’s a bit of a payoff near the end, it doesn’t really add a great deal to the movie; Lucy and her family — which also includes Philip’s wealthy, disbelieving parents — are more than enough.

“Gentle Monster,” with its long, slow takes and moody silences, takes us meticulously and painfully through Lucy's journey, as she learns to live with the complicated emotions of simultaneously despising Philip and still feeling something for him. As she says, sadly, “there is no off button for love.”

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'GENTLE MONSTER'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexuality, graphic nudity and some language)

Running time: 1:54

How to watch: Now in theaters and streaming on Netflix Nov. 18

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