Catherine Breillat's "Last Summer" is an intimately uncomfortable movie about power, how it's held, how it's abused, and how the systems built to protect the vulnerable can be turned against them. Watching it in 2026, it reads less like a psychological drama than a study of a mechanism we're seeing operate at every level of public life.
Anne (Léa Drucker) is a lawyer who specializes in protecting vulnerable children, specifically, minors who've been sexually abused. She's got the perfect life: loving husband, two adopted daughters, the works. Then her teenage stepson Théo (Samuel Kircher) moves in, and Anne begins a sexual relationship with him. This isn’t a mistake, it’s intentional and Anne uses the skills she spent a career honed to protect children to instead abuse this one.
Breillat has made a film about the specific kind of abuser who exists inside the very institutions designed to prevent them. We’ve all seen or read about a version of Anne before but not as specific as a child protector turned predator.
Breillat has crafted complicated women for her entire career, but Anne might be her scariest creation yet. While Lydia Tár (from Todd Field’s 2022 film "Tár”) her power over musicians to manipulate them, Anne turns something far more foundational against a child: the entire architecture of protection that adults are supposed to build around minors. Tár is a portrait of a manipulator. Last Summer is a portrait of a predator who understands prevention from the inside.
The film's visual language is brilliant in its restraint. When Anne and her husband share a scene, the camera barely moves; everything's locked down, controlled, composed, proper. But when Anne's with Théo, the camera becomes intimate and unstable. A visualization of the film’s argument: professional composure unravelling as she grooms Théo.
Breillat doesn't waste time with the "will they or won't they" suspense. She knows we know where this is going. What she's interested in is the mechanics of abuse, how someone with Anne's credentials can flip the script so completely. When her husband confronts her, we don't get a drawn-out melodrama. He makes his accusation, she reacts, and suddenly he's crying on her shoulder, broken and in her palm. She uses her professional expertise on the man whose son she has abused. It works.
This is the playbook we see everywhere now:
Gain position of trust
Break that trust spectacularly
Manipulate everyone into thinking you're the victim
Walk away scott-free
Anne drops the film's most chilling line about this: "Vertigo isn't the fear of falling. It's fear of the irrepressible temptation to fall." She's telling us flat out that she knows exactly what she's doing. The film’s horror is that Anne knows what she is doing, she sees it, she has been tempted to fall. What makes Anne terrifying isn't the affair itself, although that's monstrous enough. It's her complete corruption of her professional identity.
The film's efficiency mirrors the way abuse of power happens. No grand gestures, no mustache-twirling. Just small lies, tactical misdirections, and suddenly you're trapped in someone else's game where they hold all the cards.
By the end, Anne gets away with it. She maintains her marriage, keeps her professional standing and remains completely composed. Théo, meanwhile, is an embodiment of what Breillat suggests, that hurt is like a badge to carry and eventually pass down. The grim ending of this summer film is with generational damage secured. It’s what institutional abuse looks like when it isn’t stopped.
Breillat films abuse of power with the precision of a surgeon and the intimacy of a confessional. "Last Summer" isn't just about one woman's mistake. It's about how people we entrust with protection can turn that trust into the instrument of the harm they were meant to prevent. More than a metaphor for our moment, it feels like a description of it.