The Beast
DISCLAIMER: ‘THE BEAST’ IS BEST ENTERED WITH ABSOLUTELY ZERO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE. NO TRAILERS. NO SYNOPSES. NO REVIEWS. SO FOR THE LOVE OF CINEMA, PLEASE SEE THE FILM BEFORE READING.
So you have chosen death. But first, an anecdote.
I work in a small advertising agency called Hypnosis. This must be confusing for the people of Subiaco because on multiple occasions, we’ve had knocks on the door from folks asking if we do past life regressions. The most recent was an older gentleman who had just done his grocery shopping and was on his way home when he saw our signage and thought “at last.” Apparently, the metaphysical industry of today pales in comparison to the 80s and 90s, where you couldn’t swing a dick without running into a hypnotist or some other pseudoscientific practitioner. “That’s interesting,” I told him, in a hurry to escape the conversation. More fool me. Because a few weeks later I would find myself completely absorbed by a film about past life regression, AI and the existential fear that permeates lifetimes called The Beast.
From director Bertrand Bonello comes this film that can’t quite be defined by any one genre, nor perhaps even the three that Wikipedia has assigned it. Based on the 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, The Beast in its essence is about an evergreen fear of something holding a person back from living their life, and the cyclical effect this has on each life that follows on. Léa Seydoux plays Gabrielle, a pianist, doll factory owner, aspiring model, commercial actress, housesitter and one of the 67% of people rendered ‘useless’ after artificial intelligence rescued the world from some unnamed catastrophe. These vocations exist not at the same time but in each of her current and past lives. And so too does Louis (George MacKay), a man with whom she seems to have connected but never actually consummated a relationship.
In 2044, present-day Gabrielle is unsatisfied with her AI-mandated job as a data core temperature reader. It’s one of the careers deemed appropriate by those in power; after all, it was humans and their emotions that brought the world to the brink before being bailed out by the cool, calm and collected machines they created. But there is some hope for Gabrielle to level up – she, like many before her, has the option to undergo a procedure that ‘purifies’ her DNA and removes the emotional baggage of her past lives. Gabrielle is a unique case, though; in each past life she feels an overwhelming sense of fear that some unknown threat stalks and will eventually consume her. She will require several sessions of past life regression therapy to get to the root of her dread. And so we follow her down the rabbit hole, back and forth through time both literally, in that we span a period from 1910 to 2044, and figuratively, in that certain ‘lives’ seem to exist concurrently in some sort of Schrödinger's cat trap. The answer reveals itself as we tunnel deeper into the maze of Gabrielle’s history. And it is quietly terrifying.
I’d had a busy week prior to our Saturday morning screening of The Beast and hadn’t had the time to look up so much as a synopsis. And thank God, because it made my experience all the more immersive. The film is a heady one full of time jumps, jarring cuts and the odd dystopian sci-fi image that might baffle the mind if it fails to focus from the first scene. It covers themes like the power of nostalgia and our increased yearning for nostalgia in times of confusion, of self betterment and self modification, of the overwhelming loneliness that being perpetually online brings, and of that void that exists when, for whatever reason, you can’t connect with other human beings. These are explored through Gabrielle’s obsession with searching for answers now rather than just living in the moment. She’s so fearful of this unknown threat that she is constantly in danger of bringing it about. In James’ novella the main character is a man whose unshakable sense of foreboding leads him to reject the opportunity for love out of fear that he may subject the ‘beast’ that awaits him to his prospective wife. Gabrielle fulfils the role here in an even more interesting way because she is female, and if the outcome of the Man v Bear experiment taught us anything, she has every reason to feel afraid.
The Beast is masterful in its ability to make the audience feel Gabrielle’s deep seated, intense fear first from the outside and later, from a far more uncomfortable vantage point. There’s a Lynchian quality to some of its scenes (the house Gabrielle is sitting in her 2014 reality is particularly Mulholland Drive coded) and Léa Seydoux inhabits the character with beautiful, palpable terror. While we can never truly feel the fear that she’s feeling, we become intimately familiar with her face, its expressions and what they mean. Not since Laura Palmer have I felt so worried for a person whose predestined tragedy we’re witnessing play out. Not since Blue Velvet have I been so disturbed by a Roy Orbison song sung by someone else. The most climatic scene in the film occurs in this house in the Hollywood hills and left me petrified in the way that only my most fantastical and nightmarish dreams do. Seydoux’s anguished face in the finale still sits painfully behind my retinas.
Meeting Seydoux’s brilliant performance is George Mackay, who Bonello never intended for the role. His first choice was Gaspard Ulliel, who unfortunately passed away following a ski accident in 2022 and to whom the film is dedicated. A sweeping search for Seydoux’s co-star then began and on the last day the French director met the British MacKay, who didn’t speak a lick of French, but whose dedication to learn the language so he could go beyond phonetics and act in French wildly impressed him. I’d seen a few of Gaspard Ulliel’s films and thought he was wonderful but after having witnessed what MacKay manages in this film, particularly in one iteration of his character that’s based on an infamous American incel, I don’t believe Ulliel would’ve pulled it off with the same level of success.
Every inch of this film is dripping with something that heightens the audience’s sensory experience, whether it’s the stunning costumes spanning the pre-War era to the minimalistic linen garb of the future or the foreboding camerawork that gives us snippets of locations we will later explore from a different perspective, there’s craft everywhere you look. It’s equal parts style and substance and that, paired with the subtitles (about half of the film is in French) might be a lot to take in for regular moviegoers. But it raises so many interesting, prescient points that are relevant to anyone living now who might be experiencing some degree of overwhelm. It could be worse, folks. Much, much worse.
Comments on our current trajectory as a species aside, this is a film not about technological advancements but our preoccupation with them and the other anxiety-inducing things that fill our social media feeds and distract us from our day to day. I think it was Ferris Bueller who said “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Had Gabrielle ventured out of her house and gone to the movies in 1986, perhaps she’d have vanquished her beast.
Verdict:
☆☆☆☆☆
The Beast is in select cinemas Thursday 30th May. Be brave, go see it.
