Vicky Krieps returns to French cinema, this time behind the camera
The Luxembourg-born actor steps into directing with a custody drama premiered at Cannes and picked up for US distribution by Peccadillo Pictures.
On 10 July 2026, Peccadillo Pictures released the official US trailer for Love Me Tender, a first feature directed by Vicky Krieps and, per the distributor's notes, set around a mother fighting for custody of her son. The trailer runs on the hook line "We'll get through this, Mum."
Krieps is best known as an actor — the Luxembourg-born performer whose turn in Phantom Thread (2017) and whose lead in Corsage (2022) made her one of the most distinctive European screen presences of the past decade. With Love Me Tender, she steps behind the camera for what is billed as her directorial debut: an intimate, single-location custody drama in which she also stars. Peccadillo Pictures, the UK distributor long associated with art-house and queer cinema, has acquired US rights.
The custody battle on screen is bare and domestic. The mother's ex-partner, by the framing of the trailer, wants their child; she wants him to stay. A court date approaches. There are no flashbacks to a happier marriage, no third-act courtroom speech. The form matches the marketing: this is a feature built around what a small cast can do inside one apartment over a weekend.
What the trailer tells us
The first cut leans on a single setting — a sun-bleached flat, clotheslines out the window, a child moving between rooms as adults try to keep their composure. Krieps plays the mother; the trailer foregrounds her physical stillness rather than dialogue. A line about "doing this properly" lands over a shot of her folding a small jumper. There is no visible violence, no screaming match. The cruelty is procedural: who gets to keep the boy, and on what paperwork.
That restraint is the picture's commercial pitch. Peccadillo has built a reputation on slow-burn character pieces; the trailer positions Love Me Tender inside that catalogue rather than chasing festival-shock aesthetics. From the cut alone, the drama reads closer to Je vous aime, très beaucoup or a Hong Sang-soo weekend than to a Hollywood custody thriller.
Why this film, why now
A director first-time-out making a film about maternal rights and an absent or hostile co-parent is, by itself, unremarkable. What makes the timing legible is the political weather around it. Across Europe, post-separation custody disputes have moved up the public agenda as family-court reform becomes an active legislative file in France, Spain and Germany, and as donor-insemination cases have begun redrawing who counts as a parent at law. Krieps is not, on the evidence of the trailer, wading explicitly into any of those debates. But the film lands in a marketplace where intimacy, motherhood and the legal definition of a family are all in live circulation.
It also lands inside a working-class frame that festival cinema has tended to under-resource. The flat is not a stylist's pied-à-terre; the clothes on the line are working clothes. The mother's resources are visibly thin. A picture about maternal custody told from inside that financial precarity is a different object than the same picture told from a townhouse in the 7th arrondissement.
The Krieps pivot
Cast against the obvious reading — that Love Me Tender is one more actor-director vanity project — is Krieps's particular track record. Her breakout was a role defined by refusal: in Corsage, playing Empress Elisabeth of Austria as a woman who treats her own mythology as a prison to escape. The through-line of her best-known performances is women using whatever room they have to push back against the men and institutions that enclose them. A directorial debut about a mother who fights, rather than folds, fits that arc.
The counter-reading is also fair: actor-directors with a distinctive on-screen persona often import that persona into their first feature and end up casting themselves in a role they have already played, in another register, six times. Love Me Tender may be that risk. The trailer does not resolve it; only the finished film can.
What to watch
Three things will tell the picture's real weight. First, the Cannes reception — where the film premiered and where Krieps's previous work has been honoured — will indicate how European critics read the formal choices. Second, Peccadillo's release pattern: the distributor's pacing will signal whether this is positioned as a prestige-platform title or a niche art-house run. Third, the festival-to-audience gap: whether a custody drama with no marquee co-stars and a fifty-something director-actress at its centre finds a US audience, or settles into the catalogue of European films American viewers admire without quite watching.
The trailer's restraint is the marketing bet. Krieps and Peccadillo are asking viewers to sit with a woman in a flat, watching her try to keep her child, on the promise that the watching is the point. Either that bet pays out in the small theatres that pick the film up, or Love Me Tender becomes another one of those releases whose critical reception outruns its footprint. There is no middle outcome worth naming.
This piece follows Monexus's coverage of European art-house distribution and directorial debuts; the editorial framing leans on the trailer's content and Peccadillo's catalogue positioning rather than on claims the trailer does not support.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/s/firstshowing/26918
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicky_Krieps
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccadillo_Pictures
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsage_(film)