by Tim Gordon
Rebecca Zlotowski has built her reputation on crafting emotionally rich, female-centered narratives that probe life’s fragile turning points: fertility, adolescence, love, and identity with a balance of warmth and unflinching honesty. In A Private Life (Vie privée), she takes her most intimate lens yet, training it on the interior unraveling of a woman who has quietly disconnected from everything around her.
That woman is Lilian Steiner, played with fierce restraint by two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster, who delivers her third French-language performance. A psychiatrist by trade, Lilian has spent her career listening to others but now finds herself unable to feel half-hearing her patients, estranged from her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil), and detached even from her own son and grandson. Her life, once defined by discipline and order, now feels like a room with all the windows shut tight.
When a longtime patient abruptly quits, declaring that a hypnotist succeeded in weeks where Lilian had failed for eight years, the doctor is shaken. Soon after, another patient dies by suicide, and when Lilian arrives at the wake, the widower blames her outright. These events trigger a floodgate of tears she cannot control, leading her back to her ex-husband, an ophthalmologist, who assures her nothing is physically wrong. His advice to see a hypnotist pushes Lilian into a spiraling journey of self-examination and possibly hallucination that blurs the lines between mystery, reality, and her own repressed grief.
Zlotowski, working with co-writers Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, constructs the film as both a murder mystery and a psychological character study, but its deepest thread is the question of what happens when the person who is supposed to “heal” others loses all connection to herself. The screenplay stretches certain beats too long, leaving viewers stranded in the same uncertainty as Lilian, but that disorientation feels intentional, a mirror of her own interior collapse.
Foster is magnetic at the center, carrying the film with a fluency that transcends language. Nearly six decades into her career, she proves once again why she remains one of cinema’s most riveting presences: even speaking entirely in French, she maintains a profound relatability. Foster plays Lilian as a woman frozen in reserve, whose cracks begin to show in sudden, startling bursts of emotion. You cannot take your eyes off her.
The supporting ensemble adds layers of intrigue Virginie Efira and Mathieu Amalric as the Cohens-Solals, whose secrets weave into Lilian’s unraveling; Vincent Lacoste as her ambitious son, Julien; and Luana Bajrami as the sharp-eyed Valérie. Together, they populate a world that feels both intimate and claustrophobic, tightening the noose around Lilian as she slips further into uncertainty.
If A Private Life falters, it’s in its density. The mystery element sometimes overcomplicates what could have been a sharper exploration of emotional detachment and longing. Yet, in Zlotowski’s hands, even the film’s ambiguity resonates because life’s breakdowns rarely resolve cleanly.
Ultimately, A Private Life is less about its whodunit trappings and more about the fragile architecture of a woman’s psyche, one that Foster embodies with grace and magnetism. It’s an uneasy, often unsettling film, but one that lingers precisely because it doesn’t give us easy answers.
Grade: B
