Yes, this is intriguingly enough a French film by director Paul Verhoeven, the same director who is best known for Robocop, Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Verhoeven apparently first tried to make this film in the US but could not find a well known American actress willing to accept this risqué role. He then decided that an American film would be too conventional a thriller anyway and so made it in France, going to the extent of learning French to do so. Impressive dedication for a man in his mid-70s!

A middle-aged woman, Michèle Leblanc, is violently raped in her own home one afternoon by an unknown assailant wearing a ski mask. Yet she doesn’t report the incident and continues with her daily routine as if nothing had happened. She is the co-owner of a video game company with her best friend Anna and remains friends with her ex-husband Richard. The incident doesn’t go away however as she starts receiving harassing messages on her phone, eventually escalating to the intruder returning to her home to masturbate on her bedsheets. At the same time, she deals with her various relationships, including her son who is having issues with his pregnant girlfriend, her aged mother who wants to marry her much younger boyfriend, and the young couple who are her neighbors. Lurking in the background behind all this is the family’s dark secret: the fact that her father is in prison for a mass murder committed 30 years ago.

Elle is a difficult film to come to grips with as Michèle’s reactions to events don’t seem quite normal. One of the strange themes here is that every character seems to have a sexual perversion of one form or another so there is no such thing as normality. The video games that Michèle’s company makes for example seem to feature violent tentacle rape and none of her employees express any disgust when she exhorts them to ramp up the sex factor. When her son angrily refuses to acknowledge that the baby whose skin is noticeably darker than that of his own skin or that of his mother and his wife has a black friend who hangs around them, one is attempted to interpret this as yet another form of kink. Some of these kinks are pretty exotic including a video of a crush fetish. Since none of the characters behave as you would expect, the film is rather unpredictable and unsettling but I wouldn’t say that it’s actually good.

Some critics have noted that Michèle’s character arc is a form of female empowerment, if again a highly perverse one. Her childhood experiences with her father have led her to never rely on the police no matter what happens. Instead she seems to submit to male aggression and play along at least for a while only to backstab them later. It’s a strange twist of the usual femme fatale role as she is both the victim and the agent of her own liberation. Another oddity about this film is that while there is pretty of sex, I don’t believe any of it is intended to arouse the viewer as was the case of Verhoeven’s previous erotic films. On the contrary, the intention seems to be to disturb and unsettle, which it certainly succeeded with me.

This film managed to win plenty of kudos and awards. I don’t agree that it’s a very good film and I don’t like it at all. I will admit that it’s a highly unusual and unique film made by a fine cast and a skilled director. Your mileage may vary.