Rebecca Zlotowski’s French thriller A Private Life is a melange of tones and themes searching for stronger connective threads. The plot reads like a cross between a far less aggressive take on the kinds of physician focused psychological thrillers that were all the rage in the early 2000s (Don’t Say a Word, Hide and Seek, Gothika), a poetic, psychosexual rumination on latent feelings of queerness, and a multi-layered relationship drama between a woman and the husband and son she turned her back on. Everything here messily fights for focus in A Private Life, leading to an initially interesting approach that can’t decide if it wants to be suspenseful, sorrowful, or profound. Zlotowski can never deliver on more than one of those feelings at any given time, leading to a film that’s both static and jarring in equal measure.
Jodie Foster (a fluent French speaker who puts those skills to good use for the first time in a long time) stars as Lilian Steiner, an ex-pat American psychiatrist in Paris, whose life is thrown into disarray not long after learning one of her patients has taken her own life. 47-year old Paula (Virginie Efira) showed no previous warning signs of suicidal ideation in any of her sessions with Lilian, but the deceased husband (Mathieu Amalric) places blame squarely upon the overmedicating doctor’s shoulders. Paula’s daughter (Luàna Bajrami), however, thinks something else might be going on, insisting to have a moment with Lilian, who rebuffs the young woman repeatedly on the grounds of patient-client confidentiality.
That’s kind of the set up given by Zlotowski (Grand Central), co-writer Anne Berest, and collaborator Gaëlle Macé, but A Private Life wants no part of being a straightforward thriller where an apparent suicide turns out to be a potential murder. At one point, in a bid to stop a constant crying jag, Lilian pays a visit to a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin) who helped one of her patient stop smoking. While under hypnosis, Lilian begins to formulate a theory that either the husband or daughter had something to do with Paula’s death. She also envisions a lot of other things involving an orchestra, doorways to childhood traumas, and Nazi militias from World War II. To help unravel all of this input, Lilian turns to her optometrist ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil), with whom she still harbours some fond, romantic feelings.
It’s a lot to take in, but in this type of genre exercise, one expects Zlotowski and company to eventually show a meaning for everything being dumped on the viewer. The expectations provided by the set-up don’t measure up to the ultimate results, which leaves A Private Life not much more than a muddled whodunnit with an interesting character at its centre. So much energy is expended in terms of framing the narrative as a story of a physician who resolutely won’t heal thyself, that the core mystery surrounding what happened to Paula get shrugged off as being not that big of a deal until late in the film.
Zlotowski can compose scenes well in terms of staging and craft, but there’s no discernible sense of pacing, which again speaks to the story’s inability to settle on a specific tone for more than brief stretches at a time. There are moments where Lilian is being threatened by an unseen terror lurking in the shadows, and a profound sense that the doctor could be slowly unravelling beneath her well cultivated stoicism. But Zlotowski’s well handled moments of unease and discomfort often revert back to a colder, more clinical sort of character study that kills any attempts at narrative momentum. It also doesn’t help that the interesting performances from Guillemin and Bajrami are too brief, Auteuil’s turn is too comedic leaning to show much chemistry alongside Foster, and the usually reliable Amalric is only on hand to glower and gruffly grumble until the film finally needs him to speak his mind (too late into the movie to make much of an impact).
But A Private Life does have Foster in the lead, and I’m not sure if her great work here is a help or a hindrance to what Zlotowski is trying to achieve. As a germaphobe, commitment averse, and clearly “over it” professional, Foster displays a lot of strength as the unflappable doctor. Foster has proven her capability to top-line a suspenseful mystery before, but here the performer makes the decision to lean into Zlotowski’s subtext surrounding healing and personal growth. It’s a good choice for a drama, but maybe not for a mystery, especially when the character is so intelligent that most of their emotional breakthroughs are incremental and small. Foster has a great and subdued quality here, but A Private Life needs more spark than she can provide.
By the end of A Private Life, things are wrapped up in somewhat ambiguous fashion, but the bigger mystery revolves around what the viewer should take away from this. Zlotowski deals with a lot of loaded topics ripe for emotional explanations and payoffs, but none of them offer much in the way of primal or intellectual impact. The biggest reveal by the end of the film is that this was a project that looks smart, but was simply going through the motions. It’s not the same motions as more cliched genre fare, but one can feel the effort necessary to get from point A to point B within every frame of A Private Life.
A Private Life opens at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto and Fifth Avenue Cinemas in Vancouver on Friday, January 23, 2026. It expands to Ottawa and Montreal on January 30th and to additional Canadian cities over the following weeks.
