Elle (2016)

Paul Verhoeven, working in French for the first time, takes a premise that could have been a revenge thriller and declines every opportunity to make it one. Michèle, played by Isabelle Huppert with unnerving composure, is raped in her own home and then finishes her day. The film tracks her affairs, her sullen son, her monstrous father, and her quiet negotiation with the man who attacked her. The milieu is entirely white, Parisian, and comfortable. No racial question is raised, no queer life appears, no climate anxiety intrudes, and nobody's body is discussed as a political subject. The video game company she runs supplies office politics and crude animations, not an occasion for economic critique.

There is a feminist current here, though it runs shallow and cold. Michèle holds power in her workplace, refuses the role of trembling victim, and treats her stalker as a puzzle to be solved on her own terms. Yet the film argues nothing. Its handling of rape and consent is deliberately perverse, built to unsettle any viewer who arrives with a thesis. Huppert has described the character as going against predictable definitions of womanhood, and that is the closest the film comes to a position. Conviction is not its business. Ambiguity is.

This is a movie that never lectures. It offers no lesson about consent, no lesson about patriarchy, no lesson about anything, which in 2016 was already a rare posture and is now nearly extinct. The result is a thriller of unusual discipline, disturbing and unresolved, with a lead performance that carries the whole uneasy construction. On the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, it registers as a faint mark and little else. That restraint is not a failure. It is the reason the film still has teeth.