Elle (2016)

This psychological thriller is very good but hard to watch--it opens with the assault and rape of a 60-ish woman and the plots twists and turns from then on. Isabelle Huppert's Michèle is a tough gal who designs violent video games with her best friend/business partner Anna, played by Anne Consigny (they were last blogged for The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them and Wild Grass, respectively). Support is provided by Charles Berling (most recently in these pages for Summer Hours) as Michèle's ex-husband, Laurent Lafitte (Tell No One (2006) and many more) as her neighbor, and Jonas Bloquet (new to me) as her son, among others.

The movie is in French, set in Paris, with actors from France, Germany, and elsewhere. Director Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), Black Book (2006), and he removed his name from the disastrous Showgirls (1995)) is Dutch. American writer David Birke adapted the 2012 French novel Oh... by Philippe Djian and, apparently, it was to be an American movie until Huppert came on board. Then a translator was hired. Birke has said that his words are on screen in the subtitles (I did notice, with my high school French training, that everything wasn't translated exactly but close enough).

The moody music by Anne Dudley (was in the band The Art of Noise, won an Oscar for The Full Monty (1997), also scored, among others, Say Anything... (1989), The Crying Game (1992), Pushing Tin (1999), and Black Book (2006)) is just right (here's a track).

The movie won two Golden Globes the other night, for Best Foreign Film and Best Actress, and has more nominations and wins in the pipeline, some of which are listed here.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences are averaging 88 and 77. If you have the fortitude for this sort of thing, you should see it.