Critics reviews

Brimming with razor-sharp dialogue, mostly delivered by Huppert with malicious glee, Elle busies itself with mocking middle-class problems such as parking, adultery, and ungracefully ageing parents. Verhoeven has cited The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972) as a key influence, and Elle similarly capitalises on the dramatic possibilities of the dinner-party scene.

After Michèle has finished jerking off, she wipes herself with a Kleenex which she discards – and Huppert is fantastic here, as if saying "I know it's not the way it's done, but I am still doing it, darn it, for it's a great performative gesture". I love her at this moment, as she reconnects with all the actresses in the past who have allowed these tiny little breaches between the self and the performance, to express the gap between the way a woman's part is written and the way a woman acts.

Verhoeven deftly sketches a social milieu that is part Chabrol (due to Huppert's presence) and part Buñuel: under the pleasant façade of 'sophisticated' bourgeois manners lie perverse power games and secret double lives. Distinct from the more detached 'ensemble view' favoured by those directors, Verhoeven and his screenwriter tell this complex tale by closely observing the enigmatic, ever-surprising behaviour of Michèle, who is among the most memorable screen creations of the past decade.

The movie both succumbs to and rises above the rhetorical positions and derision tossed at it, and delivers perhaps the year's most biting satire, a film unafraid of its complexity and hard to pin-down characters and events.

Something Wild and Elle stand out among their peers by not offering easy answers to these impossible questions, but instead asking viewers to empathize through the acutely observed complexities of two women who both have to live with rape.

A jet-black comedy and discomfiting morality tale that validates once again the perversion, daring and sophistication of Paul Verhoeven's vision... Equally crucial to the film is the slippery genius of star Isabelle Huppert, who turns in a performance that withstands any easy actorly tricks to inhabit the mind and body of a person who can't be adequately pigeonholed as either victim, debauchee, or Strong Female Lead.

Huppert's portrayal of Michèle, who happens to be the daughter of a serial killer, is both nuanced and alarmingly curt... The fact that Michèle orders sushi after being raped has been much commented upon—how strange, what nerve!—when the most telling aspect of Huppert's performance is that she doesn't cry, except when a bird smashes into her window.

Verhoeven's reshuffling of life-long obsessions, the seemingly inextricable tie between sex and violence, the danger inherent in religious faith and so on is, in Elle, both thrilling and confusing. Mind game of the year, hands down.

It's a daring look at a woman who is not like most women in movies -- not merely because of how she handles the rape that opens the film -- but because of the way she talks, considers her actions, indulges her fantasies, excites her cruelty, reflects on her so extraordinary backstory that, in another movie, would seem easy and ridiculous (as in, "Oh, so this is why she's so weird...").

I did not see this so much as a "rape movie" than an ultramodern career-woman picture in which the situations the protagonist had to contend with were turned up to eleven in the dicey department. In other words, a Paul Verhoeven picture. Young filmmakers who go "too far" are sometimes credited with audacity; Verhoeven has nursed his own filmmaking character into a not-unreflective-perversity. He and Isabelle Huppert find near-perfect partners in crime with each other.

Paul Verhoeven, making his first narrative feature in a decade, may be credited as the director of this constantly bewildering, obsidian-black comedy about a video-game exécutrice who gets revenge — sort of — on the man who rapes her. But the film would be an obscenity without the authorial stamp of Isabelle Huppert, its indomitable, hyper-alert star.

This is vintage Verhoeven, to be sure, and it's certainly the more provocative of these two films. If visceral, unflinching, sly provocation are what you're principally after in cinema, it's the better film, too. But Things to Come is the wiser, deeper, more lived-in portrait.