The Mad Women's Ball: The prize-winning, international bestseller and Sunday Times Top Fiction selection

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The nurse is skeptical at first, but Eugénie communicates with Blandine to rightly predict the accident of Geneviève’s father, and Geneviève rushes to the house to discover her father bleeding. Hysteria, the film suggests, was then a catch-all term that enabled male doctors to control women, many of whom had been previously abused. After the proof, Geneviève sides with Eugénie, but as her case is handed over to cold-hearted nurse Jeanne, Geneviève finds herself helpless.

She fixed the broken faces from the first world war and then she fixed the faces of Jewish prisoners who were beaten by the Gestapo. Because, as Richer noted, “the camera loves her”, she was also one of the hospital’s most photographed inmates. Laurent means the behavioural modification facilities, also known as tough love or wilderness camps for “troubled teens”, that were indicted last year in a documentary by Paris Hilton. Melanie Laurent paints her women-centric movie with a challenging, intense, and impressionable palette that hooks the audience right from the beginning to the end.I’m making movies and the more I’m seeing the world fall apart, the less tolerance I have for actors complaining. Genevieve is a senior nurse at the asylum, and while rigid and formal, she’s still a beacon of stability for the many women warded there. As a voracious reader, I’ve never felt bound to any one genre of publishing, though crime fiction certainly has primacy in my heart. Pressing her head and feet against the bare boards, she creates a perfect arc with her back as “the expressions on her face veer from ecstasy to pain, her contortions punctuated by guttural breaths”.

But he is best remembered for his work with female “hysterics”, whom he treated with hypnosis, cauterisation of the cervix and compression of the ovaries, both with the hands and – over many hours – with a kind of medical vice. The film was made during lockdown; the allegory of a group of people driven mad by incarceration isn’t lost on Laurent. I am excited to see what they have done with it, but if they asked me to remove a character or a story it would feel like chopping off a limb.Dancing here is also symbolic since although a 19th-century woman has to dance to the tunes of a patriarchal vigilante, she reasserts her artistic freedom through the creative act of performance. But Laurent insists that her latest project will not – unlike The Mad Women’s Ball – be an indictment of the patriarchy. They previously launched CucoTV, an app with similar content and that continues to offer superb functioning. At 17 she began reading Guy de Maupassant and Marguerite Duras and realised she wanted to create her own stories behind the curtain. It is a selfish thought, and she feels a little ashamed, but that is just how things are at this moment: her first concern must be to get out of here.