A Private Life Review: Jodie Foster's Captivating Murder Mystery Is Psychologically Dense and Thrillingly Strange

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Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

American Psychologist Dr. Lilian Steiner (Judie Foster) has lived in France so long now that her French is practically indistinguishable from the Parisian accent of her patients. She has an uncommonly strange relationship with her ophthalmologist ex-husband, Dr. Gaby Haddad (Daniel Auteuil), and a pretty terrible one with her son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), plus a now ex-patient suing her for eight years of what he calls negligent care (aka an inability to formally "cure" him of a smoking addiction), but mostly, Lilian has a full life.

As its title directly suggests, it is indeed A Private Life, beholden as she is to patient confidentiality, but it is a life nonetheless, the moderate comforts of which are thrown into chaos when she learns that her longtime patient, Laura (Virginie Efira) has died of apparent suicide, by overdose of pills which Lilian has prescribed. Rebecca Zlotowski's psychological thriller is a tantalizing film of uncommon intrigue. What begins as an off-kilter character portrait of a prickly intellectual comfortably slides into a murder mystery investigated by an amateur sleuth with a personal life more chaotic than the lives of the people she treats. Its bizarre blend of genre and tonality comes together in an altogether surprising way; a labyrinth of ceaseless pleasures.

Jodie Foster is a Charming Amateur PI in Transcendent A Private Life

At the center of that is Judie Foster, whose French fluency has now given her three roles in the language she started learning as an infant (the last came in 2004 in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement). Lilian is one of her most complex roles in an illustrious career full of them, a charming curmudgeon whose professionally constructed walls are crumbling despite her best efforts. Upon learning that Laura has died, Lilian starts uncontrollably leaking tears, and, because she has spent so long carefully avoiding any display of vulnerability out of deference to her patients, she cannot possibly conceive of the idea that she may, in fact, be just processing something traumatic.

Lilian attends Paula's shiva, the Jewish mourning practice which is practiced at the home of the dead's immediate relatives, where she instinctively removes the ceremonial covering of the mirrors at Paula's husband's home. Simon (Mathieu Amalric) warns her that doing so risks releasing the dybbuk, an evil spirit from Jewish folklore, before violently expelling her from his home upon learning who she is. Thus sparks Lilian's theory that, perhaps, Laura didn't die by suicide, but by homicide. If Lilian couldn't spot the signs of suicidal ideation, then surely she wasn't suicidal — she was murdered.

The mostly isolated Lilian turns to her ex-husband Gaby, first under the pretense of figuring out why she's involuntarily crying, but soon the two are re-sparking their romance as they snoop around Simon and his daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajrami), who thinks that Laura left a message from the afterlife. While all this happens, her relationship with her son gets worse and worse as Lilian, clearly avoidant of Julien's needs and that of his newborn son, Joseph, refuses to acknowledge the pain of anyone else around her.

Zlotowski seems to be asking what effect, if any, such repeated exposure to the problems of others might have on someone whose job it is to help alleviate other people's pain at the expense of treating themselves.

Despite the topographical normalcy of this cat and mouse caper, A Private Life is anything but standard fare. Zlotowski, who also co-wrote the script with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, is after a more psychoanalytical approach. The film uses its more genre-specific trappings to explore questions of spiritual and physical doubling in the same manner as Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski did with his French output, particularly with the Three Colors trilogy (speaking of which, Irène Jacob makes a brief appearance as a fellow psychologist). Zlotowski seems to be asking what effect, if any, such repeated exposure to the problems of others might have on someone whose job it is to help alleviate other people's pain at the expense of treating themselves.

To that end, the film has a number of incandescent sequences of reverie-like images, including an early scene where Lilian, desperate to cure her affliction of tears, turns to the same hypnotist her litigious former patient has used. Dr. Grangé (Sophie Guillemin) puts Lilian into an odd liminal space where she is submerged in a blood-red lit descending staircase with doors that lead to memories - of her current and, apparently, former lives. Behind one of those doors, Lilian is transported to a world where she is a cellist for a symphony in a chair next to Paula, conducted by Simon, who quickly shoots her with a revolver.

What all of it really means is hardly ever as important as what it feels like for Lilian, who can only travel further down this staircase, both literal and figurative, so long as she is willing to examine herself. The answers to her questions — about Paula's death, her son's burgeoning estrangement, the very nature of her sexuality, her gender, her work — cannot be answered as long as she remains closed off to the truth: that, no matter how hard she tries, she cannot ever fully extricate herself from the people that lay down on her office couch.