Review: 'The Beast' checks off all the boxes: smart, sexy, scary, thrilling
In a multiplex dominated by limp reboots of "Ghostbusters" and the team of Godzilla and King Kong, it's a pleasure to recommend a film of startling originality, dazzle and danger. It's called "The Beast." It's in theaters right now, and you've never seen anything like it in your life.
"The Beast" checks off all the boxes: smart, sexy, scary, thrilling and highlighted by career-best performances from Léa Seydoux ("Dune, Part Two") and George MacKay ("1917") as lovers across space and time who try to kill their feelings for each other without killing their humanity.
The film starts 20 years into the future when artificial intelligence is ready to wipe out fear by eliminating pain from the human equation. Why should we worry when it's easier to transform into zonked out zombies impervious to emotions that make us feel things too deeply -- or at all?
If that sounds a lot like the here and now, you're onto the game being played by brilliant writer-director Bertrand Bonello. Using the 1903 Henry James short story "The Beast in the Jungle" as a springboard, Bonello walks the tightrope of imagination without a net as romantic partners keep falling hard for different incarnations of themselves.
Dread is the mood set and fixed in a prologue as Seydoux, playing an actress named Gabrielle, stands against a green screen while a voice directs her to act frightened as if a beast she and we cannot see approaches. Still, there's no mistaking the fear in Gabrielle's eyes -- it's real.
And so is the purification process imposed by AI to rid her of traumatic memories in her present and past lives. Then, whoosh, it's 1910, where Gabrielle, now the pianist wife of dollmaker Georges (Martin Scali) is at a posh party attended by Louis (MacKay), a handsome aristocrat who vows to protect her, especially from the beast she can't get out of her head.
Even the great flood of Paris, with Georges' studio awash with floating dolls with scary, saucer eyes, can't compare to the threat that awaits Gabrielle in 2014, where as a struggling Hollywood actress she meets Louis. This time, he's an incel, an involuntary celibate who can't find a sexual partner despite desiring one, driven by violent thoughts against women.
The scenes where Louis stalks Gabrielle through the Los Angeles mansion she's housesitting are the film's most terrifying and yet achingly tender, since Louis' love is never in doubt, only his tragic confusion about how to express it.
Bonello uses everything in his artistic palette to show the evil of AI as an instrument to detach us from the emotional highs and lows that make us human. My advice about "The Beast" is to not overthink it. Just jump in and surrender to its surreal dreamscape. Any lapses in clarity seem a small price to pay for the adventure that awaits you.
As the film juggles three time frames, letting identities shift as the world is thrown out of balance, we are encouraged to embrace the beast of our emotions instead of rushing to eradicate it. The challenge is exhilarating. You can discover a lot about yourself by getting lost in "The Beast." It grips you like a dream that won't let go.
