Tim League posted:

This is not a film that is making a blanket statement about women or sexual assault. Instead Elle is a very particular portrait of the calm, cold and calculating mind of a sociopath. The traditional interpretation of Elle’s narrative is that Michele has these traits either because she has her father’s serial-killer DNA coursing through her veins or because her emotions were stripped or atrophied after witnessing such traumatic events as a child.

I would like to suggest that there is an even more sinister interpretation of Elle. Consider the possibility that Michele is in fact the serial killer, and that her father merely stumbled upon his daughter’s crimes when he returned from work. In order to protect his beloved daughter, he quickly devised a scheme to cover her tracks and take the blame himself. In this scenario, he strips down his daughter to her underwear to remove her bloody clothes and proceeds to gather all the furniture from the house and burn it in a pile. This isn’t a continuation of his demented crime spree, but a means to burn his daughter’s clothes and the murder weapon, forever hiding the evidence. He was the only witness.

The crux of this theory comes during Michele’s holiday dinner party. After a few glasses of wine, Michele loosens up and awkwardly describes in detail the day of the grisly murders. During her detailed account, she explains that in addition to the dozens of human bodies, there were also six cats, two dogs and a rabbit that were murdered, a detail that was never given to the press and thus never reported. She further explains that despite rumors at the time, she did not accompany her father during the murders but rather she greeted him at home after he was done with the spree. But if she was unaware of the killings until her father was hauled away by the police and the specifics of the canine/feline death were never reported, how would she know the details? The account does not add up. I firmly believe this moment was inserted into the narrative to allow for this possible alternate theory of Michele as the true criminal.