A PRIVATE LIFE
Jodie Foster returns with considerable charm
Directed by: Rebecca Zlotowski
Starring: Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Mathieu Amalric
Released: 26 June 2026
Rating: 7/10
The Beaver (2011), starring Mel Gibson as a depressed CEO who turns to a glove puppet rodent in an attempt at self-healing, has a good claim to be to be the most misbegotten, misguided and miscast film of the 21st century. It certainly seemed to capsize the directing career of Jodie Foster, who has spent many of the years since producing documentaries, before her triumphant hardboiled return in 2024’s True Detective: Night Country.
She doesn’t direct A Private Life, her first film in French since 1977’s precocious Moi, Fleur Bleue, but she commands it, and the film is steered by the way her cool intelligence slides gloriously off the rails. She plays Dr Lilian Steiner, a successful psychotherapist with a swanky Parisian apartment who finds, when her favourite patient dies in mysterious circumstances, that she can’t stop crying. Despite her academic skepticism, she turns to a hypnotherapist, and so begins a past-life spiral into a dreamworld of murder, mystery and remarriage.
With stylistic nods to Spellbound, Vertigo and Rear Window, there’s a whole lot of Hitchcock homage going on. But Jodie is clearly having such fun, and finding such perfect foils in Daniel Auteuil, as her crumpled ophthalmologist ex-husband, and Mathieu Amalric, as her murderous antagonist - that the sheer hokum becomes part of the film’s considerable charm.
