Considering this is Jasmin Gordon’s debut feature, The Courageous is an unapologetically raw portrayal of motherhood. Set against the backdrop of a quiet, unassuming Swiss town – where nothing seemingly exciting happens, but that is almost the point! The film follows the mundane life of Jule (Ophélia Kolb), a 40-year-old mother of three whose unconventional parenting forces both her children and the audience to question what it means to be “a good mother”.
From the start, Jule is portrayed as a bad mother – dumping her young children at a restaurant with the promise of a quick return, only to vanish for hours. This is highly unorthodox and the waitress doesn’t help while, glowering and scowling and judging, as the kids are left to amuse themselves and ponder where she has gone – we never actually find out.
However, as the film progresses, Gordon’s film develops into a film of rebellion. As a single mum, Jule’s actions are realistic and heartbreaking – rooted in exhaustion and a system that has stripped her of dignity. She is not an unfit mother so much as a depleted one, reacting against a bureaucracy designed to fail her.
Kolb delivers a powerhouse performance, threading together Jule’s defiance, tenderness, and suppressed rage with astonishing precision. One moment, she radiates warmth as she invents games to distract her children from hunger; the next, her face hardens into a mask of despair as she contemplates the grinding machinery of welfare offices and hostile landlords.
The three children are equally as believable as pawns in the story; Claire, the eldest, becomes the conscience – asking the questions Jule won’t answer. Paul Besnier, playing Loïc, gives a particularly moving performance as a neurodivergent boy whose needs complicate, yet illuminate the family’s fragile bonds as at times, we see the struggle through his eyes. Whilst the youngest child is wild and carefree beyond his years – looking to his big sister for guidance.
With stories of struggling mothers, social systems in crisis and the crumbling of domestic ideals are commonplace European cinema, the film does not sensationalise. We are drawn into the closeness and relationship without words as we see a loving hand resting on a child’s back, a silent exchange across the dinner table which resists melodrama.
There is also a simmering feminist undercurrent. Gordon challenges the patriarchal expectation that motherhood should mean self-erasure – in a particularly strong scene with the school headmaster. Jule’s imperfections are not presented as moral failings, but as a consequence of a world that refuses to recognize a mother’s needs beyond childcare. In this way, The Courageous earns its title: it dares to ask whether survival and self-love are not just acts of rebellion, but of courage.
Still, this is not an easy film to sit through. Its bleakness may divide audiences. Some will see Jule as a hero, clawing for dignity against the odds; others may find her choices unforgivable.
Uncompromising, empathetic, and quietly radical the film is slow, yet tense and you’ll leave the cinema feeling torn between judgment and empathy.