Isabelle Huppert (Guy Ferrandis/SBS Productions, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

The audacious psychological thriller Elle opens with a black screen and the desperate cries of Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) as she’s being sexually assaulted in her own home. The first image you see is of Michèle’s cat, looking on disinterestedly while its owner is attacked. This startling opener immediately establishes two things you need to know about this movie: 1) it’s about rape and 2) it’s directed by Paul Verhoeven.

Verhoeven is the director who graduated from provocative European thrillers like The Fourth Man to provocative Hollywood thrillers like Basic Instinct, with stops along the way for provocative camp classics like Showgirls. This is the director’s first feature since the 2006 war drama Black Book, and if the presence of an arthouse star like Huppert makes you think he’s aiming for a new gentility, think again.

The actress is perfectly cast as the complicated Michèle, a victim who refuses to be victimized. She’s the CEO of a video game company that specializes in violent titles—the first we see of her company’s work is a clip of a beast essentially raping the games’ female heroine, a scene that Michèle looks at with concern not for its violence, but that her orgasmic cries aren’t vivid enough.

Michèle is a tough character who butts heads with her mostly male creative staff, and her parents are no role models either. She interrupts her elderly mother’s tryst with a young gigolo, and gets updates about her father on news reports which note the anniversary of the brutal mass murder he committed 30 years ago.

Although her father’s sins may be the worst in the movie, nobody is innocent, from the boorish man she’s having an affair with to her seemingly nice neighbors. Michèle’s initial reaction to the assault is, understandably, fear: she has her locks changed and eyes men suspiciously—viewers wonder as she does if the menacing body language of the men around her mark them as her masked attacker.

But as she has a vivid daydream about bloody revenge, it’s clear that Michèle refuses to take the assault lightly. Elle is not exactly in the vein of rape revenge exploitation like Ms. 45, but is in fact more darkly comic (keep an eye out for her grimly hilarious pet cat).

Huppert’s performance may well end up on a lot of year-end best lists, and in a sense she’s revisiting her incendiary performance (in fact echoing specific scenes) in Michael Haneke’s 2001 drama The Piano Teacher, which may have been more emotionally tense if not nearly so viscerally entertaining. Given the movie’s subject matter, it may seem appalling to give Elle such a label. But this movie abut terrible people doing terrible things to each other is an absolutely wicked thrill.

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Elle
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Written by David Birke, based on the novel by Philippe Djian
With Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Anne Consigny
Rated R for violence involving sexual assault, disturbing sexual content, some grisly images, brief graphic nudity, and language
130 minutes

Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema, the AFI Silver, and Angelika Mosaic.