Parents' Guide to A Private Life

Like some of cinema's favorite sleuths, Lilian Steiner is complex, but her case is fascinatingly different from other mysteries because she doesn't realize that she's really investigating herself. An icy, rational woman whose profession in A Private Life is to fix others' personal problems while ignoring the glaring issues in her own, Lilian is an enigma to her family—and to herself. When emotions surface that seem illogical, she uncharacteristically pursues a hypnotherapy session (after all, it helped another patient stop smoking), and it delivers her into a dream ... or is it a past life?

The "room" Lilian enters while hypnotized takes her back to World War II, where she realizes that she's a Jewish musician being targeted by Nazis. The idea of reincarnation, especially when it involves the same souls circling us over and over again, makes for imaginative fodder. But writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski doesn't center generational trauma in the story; instead, she peppers acknowledgments throughout, showing how, in today's world, a small poke of antisemitism can feel like a razor slice. Lilian, meanwhile, uses the big reveal of the regression to acknowledge the stunted emotions from one life that she has inadvertently brought into the next. Her career as a psychiatrist is not unlike that of a detective: She listens to the clues to guide patients to solve their own problems while keeping a professional distance. But, unlike a Poirot or a Blanc, who solve crimes while unbudgingly remaining the same, Lilian uses what she learns to become a better person.