Jodie Foster is magnetic in A Private Life, the new film from Rebecca Zlotowski. It's just a shame everything around her is a boring, unfocused mess.

At heart, A Private Life is part black comedy, part mystery, yet neither half fits together with the other. The result is a film that's never quite as outrageous as it should, nor as intriguing as it wants to be. Instead, it muddles somewhere halfway between the two, uncertain of where to push or pull back.

Foster plays Lilian Steiner, a bored, unfulfilled shrink who barely listens to her patients anymore. When a frequent customer suddenly kills herself, Steiner is driven to the brink of madness to discover the reason why. Her journey takes her to a suspicious hypnotist, who believes Steiner and her patient shared a history together in a past life as lovers during the Nazi occupation of France.

It sounds more fun than it actually is, though Foster sells the obsessive heartbreak so well that, for a moment, there's a chance the cacophony of elements will come together. But the script, (credited to Zlotowski, Anne Berest, and Gaëlle Macé), forces so many elements into the mix they suffocate the narrative well before it gets going.

There's a sub-plot about Steiner's obsessive compulsion with Mini-Discs to record her patients. Another about her rekindled love with ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil). One about her failures as a mother. A potential murder plot involving the sleazy Simon (Mathieu Amalric). There's even a returning patient out to sue Steiner for malpractice, which hangs around like a ticking timer that never reaches zero.

For such a busy movie, it's remarkable how slow A Private Life feels. At 105 minutes, it runs out of steam well before the halfway mark. Without Foster, it wouldn't hold interest even as a short film.

I admire any film that attempts to play with tone as much as A Private Life. That doesn't mean the results always work, but at least they're an attempt at something different. Zlotowski freely leaps from high melodrama to collective trauma of Nazi occupation to slapstick involving near-pensioners going at it like rabbits, and it's a wild mix that, in theory, should at least spark curiosity. On some level, you have to wonder: did anyone look at the big picture before putting this together?

But A Private Life isn't weird enough to warrant interest. It remains simply too timid to go anywhere truly odd to be daring. I can only imagine what someone like Paul Verhoeven would have done with the material. Some of which feels tailor-made for him.

Instead, it's an admirable mess. A film that's interesting to think about and easy to recommend for Jodie Foster's tremendous performance. At every turn, she is fantastic. Watch, for example, how she plays the uncertainty of her obsession when confronted with a simpler, more plausible explanation to her troubles. Foster takes the moment of recognition and turns it into an internal conflict that lasts seconds, yet she communicates the struggle we face when we realize the bottom has fallen out.

It's the kind of performance that reminds us why Foster remains a star after nearly 50 years in the business. She is always believable and honest. Even when the material falls short, Foster can make us believe that it hasn't.

In a way, I want to recommend A Private Life more than I can. Zlotowski is a talented filmmaker. Her previous work, Other People's Children, is tremendous. She just hasn't found the right note for this one. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have some pleasures worth exploring. In the 90s, this would have been a solid rental to tide over a quiet Friday evening. Today, in this hellscape of second screen content, A Private Life has more expectations heaped on it because we see films like it so rarely. That's an unfair proposition even for a better film.