It’s been said that we know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the oceans. Likewise, we probably understand more about the watery abyss than the long, baffling road to Best Foreign Language Film glory.

When the Academy failed to shortlist ELLE in December, eyebrows shot up this side of the Atlantic. Outrageous in the true sense of the word, Paul Verhoeven’s amalgam of thriller, pitch black comedy and domestic potboiler is not a film to be watched and forgotten – especially with the singular talents of Isabelle Huppert at the helm. Perhaps the subject matter paired with the Dutchman’s trademark contrarianism was hard to swallow. Perhaps it was punishment for SHOWGIRLS. We’ll never know.

Unperturbed, Huppert is going it alone. Nominated remarkably for the first time for an Academy Award, the beau of French cinema is finally in the running for Best Actress as Michèle LeBlanc, a Parisian pursuing her rapist with unnerving sangfroid.

A computer games executive, middle-aged, single with one adult son, Michèle lives alone in a spacious and stylishly fitted house tucked in a wealthy corner of the metropole. Any illusion of homeliness, however, is shattered from the outset as we first listen to then witness her rape in the kitchen by a masked intruder. Bloody and bruised, Michèle’s immediate reaction is to sweep up the broken crockery and arrange dinner for her son. As openings go it’s a shard of glass through the soul, and an unsettling precursor for what’s to come.

Refusing to own her victimhood, the next day she workshops a grotesque rape scene within one of her games. Far from wince, she tells the designers to turn it up to 11. “I feel stupid bringing it up,” Michèle later says, informing friends of the attack, while stating she won’t go to the police. Does she really feel it’s trivial, or does the alternative awaken something potentially more horrific?

Michèle has an impregnable persona which can only come from deep, enduring damage never allowed to show its true face. Her underlying mistrust of authorities is teased out, eventually explaining why, when her attacker begins to stalk her, Michele chooses to keep quiet, wandering her house at night to lingering, suspicious strings from Anne Dudley – as close as Verhoeven ever strays to a conventional genre moment.

Michèle’s passé attitude towards her rapist underscores her complicated relationship with sex. For a woman told by her mother (Magre) she “always wanted a sanitised version of life,” transgression runs deep. “Shame,” Michèle tells us, “is not a strong enough emotion to stop us doing something at all.” La belle dame sans merci is a lover craving intimacy in all – even despicable – forms, leading the audience through the looking glass as morality is not so much flipped but distorted out of all recognisable shape. Verhoeven, unflinching, fixes our gaze, daring us to blink.

For stretches of the film it’s difficult to place Michèle. Is she heroine, antiheroine; her own worst enemy? All of the above? It’s an unorthodox, highly provocative role befitting the mercurial actress, able to slip between effervescent and thousand-yard stare without any perceivable effort. Histrionics is not Huppert’s style. In another’s hands Michèle would have been arch; less subtle, individual – and ultimately believable – for it. Credit to writer David Birke and Huppert for coming together to realise a character knotted with contradictions and containing more multitudes than you or I.

ELLE is Huppert’s to lead, but its intentions are wider-reaching than the revenge narrative banner under which it is being sold. There’s a reason the title is “she”: ELLE is the story of women suffocated and disenfranchised by toxic masculinity. Michèle, stalked by her rapist, trapped in an affair by her best friend’s husband; her best friend Anna (Consigny), cuckqueaned; her neighbour, Rebecca (Efira), smiling thinly as her own husband’s eyes wander. Michèle’s mother, botoxing and soliciting young men to forget her own “monster” husband. Only the girlfriend of Michèle’s craven son has the upper hand on her partner, but she’s overbearing, played without any intention of us finding sympathy.

These women never identify as victims, however. In the world Verhoeven conjures it’s almost a given that men will behave so abominably, and that, to varying degrees, women expect it. It’s a damning perspective that for stretches seems almost nihilistic, suggesting women can be complicit in their own abuse.

Verhoeven and Birke have managed to create an ethical quagmire that for some could easily read as misogynistic. ELLE will repulse a certain audience, and in the least provoke the rest. It’s bold, brave filmmaking designed to unsettle and affront. A film to be appreciated, if not enjoyed; mulled over and deconstructed. What’s beyond debate is the quality of Huppert’s turn – it’s stellar stuff. Put simply, ELLE wouldn’t work without her.

(Spoiler free)

Without the skag Leith's finest lose their needle

This jungle is hell, but one kind of likes it