The Beast

When the touching sensibility and ceaseless picturesqueness of French film and the bombastic scale of the sci-fi epic collide, peculiar things occur. Fear, love, fear then love, fear overtaking love, fear amalgamated with love, more fear, love again – The Beast is a complicated rollercoaster of, well, fear and love.

In a future world governed by artificial intelligence, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is faced with an agonising choice: her love or her opportunity to exist and thrive in what has become of society (via a, to us, unthinkable procedure of DNA purification with specific amnesia thrown in). Seydoux is wonderful. Her icon status in French cinema is revelled in throughout this piece, how she is presented, dressed and written. The Beast is certainly a stunning picture, packed with deft yet vividly rich sensitivity to the tone and era of each specific setting.

Based loosely upon Henry James’s 1903 novel The Beast in the Jungle, Bertrand Bonello’s film is a tale of three distinct eras: an approximate present flanked by an equally unknowable past and future. Gabrielle and the pestilent but fascinating Louis (George MacKay), exist in and about all three, seemingly forever intertwined.

The Beast could certainly have been a trilogy, and not simply because it comes ready packaged in three handy eras. A keen bean can avidly consume an endurance piece like this with many a thousand moving parts and indulge in hints of other artistic works of years gone by, but an interdimensional romance with distinct harbinger-of-societal-doom aspects of any scale is likely to be a lot to take in. There are streaks of awe and excellence, but possibly only accessible to a particularly patient few. Still, here’s an engaging and unsettling film for those with a penchant for being engaged and unsettled.

Will Snell

The Beast is released nationwide on 31^st May 2024.

Watch the trailer for The Beast here: