The Beast review (LFF 2023), Culture Whisper
It’s important to express straight away: this critic is so happy that films like The Beast exist. They challenge your clarity, your perception, and your ideas of how a story should and can proceed. Director Bertrand Bonello roars with a volume of alienation usually present in the best artists and the worst imitators. With this film, Bonello is neither the best nor the worst – he's somewhere in between.
He draws from the mysterious dystopian spaces of David Cronenberg and throws them into the dream-logic spasms of David Lynch. It's a disparate mould of a continuum that doesn’t quite work, never matching the zenith qualities of either David, but Bonello lunges forward with gripping fervency and self-belief. Eventually, you’re eager (if exhausted) to take this bizarre journey with him.
‘Eventually’, because The Beast is hard to trust in the first hour or so. Any impatient viewer would have justifiable reasons to leave their seat early and never return, yet the curiosity remains.
You start with Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle in a green-screened VFX studio rehearsing a scene from a horror movie. Soon, she’s dressed in the period garbs of the 19th-century Belle Époque in Paris before hopping to a vacuous future with gas masks and ubiquitous AI. One of the few consistencies in this rebirthing identity crisis is George MacKay as Louis, a sort of forbidden lover whom Gabrielle is drawn to in every timeline.
Initially, it’s a barely decipherable slosh to endure. The 1910 scenes are tediously laboured: the visuals are uninteresting and the dialogue constantly circles back to Gabrielle’s portents of impending doom, which is repetitive enough to spark a mental breakdown. But stay in your seat for the 2044 scenes, contained within a manipulative 4:3 frame that dissolves any sense of control.
Surmounting this act in the script, Bonello and co-writers Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit (adapting a Henry James story) kick the confusion into life as Gabrielle and Louis find themselves in 2014 Los Angeles. LA is a more fitting environment than Paris, following a kind of surrealist film tradition after Lynch as well as David Robert Mitchell’s underrated neo-noir Under the Silver Lake.
Gabrielle’s a failing actress who house-sits for money; Louis is a raging 30-year-old incel who blames women for all his problems, a close copy of murderer Elliott Rodger. Despite these differences, their ties across time still connect them.
The Beast finds its fun and humour in this second half. It's constricted to a garish LA home with posh vases and a swimming pool, but that works with Gabrielle’s isolated anxiety. Louis’s misguided reasons for his own virginity parallel Gabrielle’s largely sexless lifestyle, gestating into a somnambulant libido worthy of novelist Haruki Murakami.
Despite trampolining back and forward through time, the crux of The Beast is in the struggle to know oneself in the face of the future. Hyper-awareness of history distorts rather than enlightens, especially when the future is being controlled for its own ends. Like Gabrielle’s sense of reality, individuality is a skewered fantasy.
However, despite the arresting values in this strange odyssey, you’re not too eager to try and unlock Gabrielle as a character. Even if certain details of Bonello’s world remain in the brain – the omniscient pigeon, the concerned clairvoyant, the uncanny toy dolls – he doesn’t secure Gabrielle in the same way. Thankfully, Seydoux is an actress who pulls the camera rather than vice versa. She’s endlessly fascinating, a beautiful conduit through a baffling, imperfect nightmare of a film.
Originally published on Culture Whisper
