The grand dame of the international art cinema, Isabelle Huppert, plays a double role in French auteur Serge Bozon’s rich, strange comic thriller, a very free reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson set in the Paris suburbs, with La Huppert as a physics professor bullied by students and colleagues, her routine of professional degradation interrupted when, after being struck by lightning, she acquires a powerful second persona that strikes fear into students and her stay-at-home husband. A deadpan, atmospheric triumph from Bozon (Tip Top, La France), one of the most original talents in contemporary French cinema. (Cartilage Films)
A bracingly odd paean to pedagogy... Mrs. Hyde upends categories while astutely calling attention to the country’s racism.
- Melissa Anderson, 4Columns
A wild science-fiction comedy, complete with simple but spectacular special effects... With his antics, Bozon offers a philosophical vision, presenting a model of authentic progress that’s also a model of authentic regression.
- Richard Brody, The New Yorker
[A] frequently insightful movie riddled with amusing asides and enigmatic developments... Huppert doesn’t undergo a radical transformation. Instead, she subtly finds herself at war with her inner confidence, and it’s often hard to tell which side has the upper hand.
- Eric Kohn, Indiewire
Mrs. Hyde is, among other things, a comedy of enlightenment––literal enlightenment, if the gold sparks coursing through Géquil’s body are any indication. Perhaps its greatest lesson isn’t within the movie, but rather the fact of it: rather than revise a stale genre, burn it anew.
- K. Austin Collins, Vanity Fair
In addition to often being quite funny, Serge Bozon’s fifth feature and second consecutive Isabelle Huppert vehicle is an exemplary film about pedagogy, perhaps one of the great ones about intuition, and also one of the strangest screen interpretations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s seminal 1886 science-fiction/horror tale.
- Blake Williams, Cinema Scope
(Available to download after screening date)