The news story that inspired Gentle Monster by Marie Kreutzer

How well do we really know those who are close to us? When the police arrive to arrest her husband and confiscate his computers, Lucy (Léa Seydoux) wants to know the truth. It’s a matter of their child’s safety.

Shock, and a sense of powerlessness were the starting point for Gentle Monster. These were the feelings Marie Kreutzer experienced while reading about a sordid case in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. In 2020, a report in the paper revealed the existence of a pedophile ring in great detail. 30,000 people were involved in cases of cruelty, abuse, and the distribution of harmful material involving children, filmed over a period of years.

“I couldn’t even finish the article that day because it made me feel physically sick,” recalls Marie Kreutzer, who, at the time, was working on securing financing for Corsage and in post-production for another project. She began gathering information on the subject before contacting the German police, along with lawyers and psychologists, in order to develop her project.

Three years later, Marie Kreutzer was once again stunned when she discovered that Florian Teichtmeister — who acted in Corsage — had been charged and sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence for possession and production of child pornography.

“I was in shock” Kreutzer says. “Initially I thought that I couldn’t carry on working on Gentle Monster because the film would always be linked with the Florian Teichtmeister case, but hiding away would have been a mistake.”

So her work focused on creating a realistic, complex narrative. Gentle Monster portrays a couple who at first glance seem almost ordinary — in love with each other, happy, yet flawed — until the day their entire family life is called into question.