, a teenager who travels to the coastal town of Trouville to visit his father. Upon arrival, he discovers his father has been called away for work, leaving Ludovic alone with his young stepmother,

La Belle Mère (directed by ) premiered at the 2016 Cannes Critics’ Week and quickly became a touchstone for discussions about the evolving representation of the mother‑in‑law figure in French‑speaking cinema. This paper offers a two‑pronged analysis. First, a close reading of the film’s narrative structure, mise‑en‑scene, and sound design uncovers how traditional domestic tropes are subverted to foreground agency, ambivalence, and intergenerational negotiation. Second, employing the Open Knowledge Research Unit (OKRU) framework, the study builds a small, open‑access corpus of reviews, interviews, and subtitles to quantitatively map recurring lexical fields (e.g., “authority,” “silence,” “food” ) and their affective valence across different reception contexts (festival critics, online forums, academic essays). The combined qualitative‑quantitative approach reveals a persistent tension between the film’s aesthetic intimacy and its sociopolitical critique of patriarchal family structures. The paper concludes by situating La Belle Mère within the broader resurgence of “family‑drama” cinema in post‑2010 Francophone media and by proposing avenues for further OKRU‑based cultural‑analytics research.