‘A Private Life’ review: Rebecca Zlotowski directs Jodie Foster in her first French-speaking lead

Dir: Rebecca Zlotowski. France. 2025. 105mins

One of several pleasures to be gleaned from Rebecca Zlotowski’s odd, uneven, likeable whodunnit is seeing Jodie Foster showcasing her fluent French for the first time in a leading role. It’s a reminder that, in an increasingly polarised world, other identities, and loyalties, are available. Foster plays an uptight psychoanalyst to the Parisian bourgeoisie – one clearly in need of some therapy herself – who stumbles on what she believes to be a murder mystery involving one of her patients.

Odd, uneven, likeable whodunnit

But this is also a drama about families and an old-school comedy of remarriage, and it’s these shifting dynamics that give A Private Life such tonal tremors. The investigative strand never quite decides whether it wants to unsettle or amuse (few directors have Hitchcock’s ability to do both). In the end, what anchors Zlotowski’s follow-up to the well-received Other People’s Children is the remarriage part – a warm, delicately ribald affair that sees Foster’s Lilian and Daniel Auteuil’s eye doctor Gabriel nestling into each other lives and habits again after a long separation. The poignant line “Why did you leave me?” turns out to be the real mystery at the heart of the story.

Following its Cannes Out Of Competition premiere, A Private Life will play better to audiences who follow Lilian and Gabriel’s lead in downing a few glasses of wine to smooth their engagement. That’s not a slight: this is a very Parisian film, one replete with polished bronze balustrades in posh stairwells and buzzy wood-lined brasseries, so it helps to be in the mood. It’s also a story of winter warmth where snow falls both in dream sequences and in real life, setting it up as a promising candidate for festive-season alternative programming. Prospects in French-language territories look solid, but Foster’s presence should drive interest elsewhere too.

Talking Heads’ song ’Psycho Killer’ plays over the opening credits but it turns out (in shades of Anatomy Of A Fall) to be emanating from the apartment above Lillian’s; when she goes to complain, the teen inhabitants insult her with a youth-slang expletive she has to Google. This, her pursed mouth, and the fact that she records all her patient sessions onto obsolete MiniDiscs, speak volumes about the rut she’s stuck in. 

She’s jolted out of it when Paula, a patient she may have gotten too close with over the years, is revealed to have committed suicide. Did Lilian inadvertently assist Paula’s death with the drugs she prescribed? Or did the man who accuses her of this – Paula’s husband Simon (an effectively creepy Mathieu Amalric) – kill his spouse, and her aunt into the bargain, to inherit a pile of money? 

The supernatural themes of Zlotowski’s 2016 spiritualism drama Planetarium (a.k.a. The Summoning) – her only real mis-hit to date – return here to provide part of the answer, both in the film’s nod to the Jewish concept of the dybbuk, and when a sceptical Lilian persuades herself to try hypnosis. The lurid visions of a possible past life that Foster’s character experiences while in a trance state – visions in which Paula, played by Virginie Efira, returns to life – add more ballast to an already overloaded story. So does a sub-plot about Lilian’s troubled rapport with a son she rarely sees (Vincent Lacoste) and his new baby.

A quirky soundtrack with an improvised feel that is jaunty at all the wrong moments (there are even castanets) further disturbs a viewing experience that, by around two-thirds of the way in, feels like it’s going off the rails – partly because the murder mystery is so lacking in suspense. But somehow it pulls itself back, thanks largely to Auteuil’s amiably ursine performance as a man who isn’t taking any of this too seriously but fancies a roll in the hay with his ex. Ultimately, it’s difficult to say what A Private Life is trying to say, but remarriage comedies don’t really need to be anything more than that – and the ending is winsome enough to make up for that second-act wobble.