She

“No one but Isabelle Huppert, that truly fearless and precise actress, could have played this role so well: Michèle runs a successful video game studio. She has everything under control; she is self-assured, sarcastic and efficient. And she remains so even after being brutally raped by a masked intruder in her villa.” (Michael Sennhauser, SRF, May 2016)

‘Little by little, the rape becomes a catalyst for her self-empowerment: she sees through the testosterone-fuelled web of relationships among her staff at the company; she ends one affair and begins another; she finally bids farewell to the ghosts of her own past. And she succeeds in exacting a perfidious revenge. More than a thriller, Elle is a malicious social comedy that thrives and flourishes around a rape fantasy come true. Verhoeven honours the traditions of the bourgeois French farce – complete with affairs, mistaken identities and hypocrisy – and combines them with the ‘rape-revenge’ motif to create something fascinatingly new.” (Magdalena Miedl, kino-zeit.de, Feb 2017)