Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
When Michèle, the CEO of a gaming software company, is attacked in her home by an unknown assailant, she refuses to let it alter her precisely ordered life. She manages crises involving family, all the while becoming engaged in a game of cat and mouse with her stalker.
Paul Verhoeven's Elle is a genuinely singular work — a rape-revenge film that subverts every expectation of the genre with dark irony, psychological complexity, and mordant French wit. Isabelle Huppert delivers one of the great screen performances of the decade, embodying Michèle with chilling control and enigmatic depth that defies easy interpretation. The plot is bracingly unconventional, refusing moral comfort at every turn and layering family dysfunction, corporate intrigue, and sexual obsession into a deeply uncomfortable whole. Its novelty is exceptional — no other film handles this subject matter with quite this register of cool, almost comic detachment. Cinematography is competent and clean but relatively understated for Verhoeven. The ending, while tonally consistent, feels slightly abrupt and doesn't fully resolve the film's psychological knots, leaving it slightly below the level of the film's best qualities.