A properly unnerving and eventually pulverising dread beats through almost every moment of Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, a period romance turned horror-thriller turned dystopian sci-fi that mixes genres, tones, and modes to create Bonello’s most ambitious and best film to date. Following a couple across over 100 years of reincarnations (or something akin to it), it’s got an awful lot on its mind, from the ravages of technology on humanity to the eternal problem of the way men exercise power over women, all while laying out a fascinatingly surreal mystery that is impossible to solve, but endlessly compelling to ponder.
Though their circumstances change, this couple boasts a few constants – they are always called Gabrielle and Louis, and they are always played by Lea Seydoux and George Mackay, respectively. Though further encounters across the years are implied, we meet them three times – once in 1910 Paris, once in 2014 LA, and finally in 2044. In the first two, disaster is impending (a great flood in 1910, an earthquake in 2014), but, in the future, calamity has been and gone, creating a world where gas masks must be worn outdoors and AI supervisors possess the power to remove the emotions from a person, a procedure that must be done to secure the best jobs.
As it transpires, it’s the 2044 version of Gabrielle who is, alongside us, witnessing her past selves through a program offered by the AI, but The Beast is not quite that simple – 1910 and 2014 Gabrielle seem able to, at points, access their future lives. It creates an unsettling poetry, as lines of dialogue and background characters appear and reappear in different contexts, almost always portending something ominous, aided by some fantastically skin-crawling sound design and music cues.
Bonello is clearly interested in the replacement of humanity here, and the ways in which we as a species are content to facilitate our own extinction. Even in 1910, The Beast manages to get this point across, with Gabrielle’s husband the owner of a doll factory, whose serene plastic faces bear an eerie resemblance to Seydoux herself. This husband is not, though, the 1910 Louis, who is instead an emotionally intelligent Englishman spending time in Paris who has been nurturing a love for Gabrielle, a pianist in this time, since they had a chance encounter in Italy a few years before. Their amour fou will prove disastrous and, even though the 1910 segment is by far The Beast’s most accessible and pleasant, the inevitability of this tragedy has a painful weight.
2014 doubles down on this doomed connection, with Gabrielle this time an aspiring actress and Louis her incel vlogger stalker, and it’s here that The Beast makes a turn into out-and-out horror. As well as exploring how the digital age has obliterated humanity, atomising our souls to the point of near non-existence, it’s here, as well as in the profoundly unsettling ending to the 2044 chapter, that Bonello introduces an even more terrifying idea – the foul contract of risk and fear that straight women must enter into to win romantic love. The Beast is partly inspired by Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, about a man who cannot live his life out of a nebulous fear that *something* is coming to destroy him, and to repurpose this as the tangible fear that men have always forced women (and maybe will always force) to fight through proves a whip-smart idea.
Bonello expresses all of this opaquely, of course, and The Beast is designed to answer no questions, but his filmmaking is so bold and precise that the ideas contained within shoot directly into the recesses of your brain and are impossible to dislodge. Superb set design and skips in time even within the individual sections disorient and discomfort, while Seydoux and Mackay give performances that are magnificent in their eerie control. Seydoux plays her beauty as both strength and vulnerability, while Mackay balances placidity with wolfishness, as well as (during the 2014 incel segment) a fine line in entitled patheticness that is very funny until, inevitably, it isn’t
Styled like a bad dream, The Beast is both one of 2024’s most intellectually thrilling films and also one of its most emotionally draining, a completely uncompromising piece of work that creates a maze of three interconnected worlds that are all too easy to get lost in. It would take a couple of viewings to catch every throughline that Bonello interlinks his time periods with, and likely even more after that to truly ‘understand’. Yet, one of The Beast’s great strengths is in its assertion – hardly a new one for Bonello – that understanding is overrated, and maybe even a weakness. No matter how much these characters try to ‘figure out’ what they dread, it haunts them all the same – The Beast has done the same to me.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 