The Beast: LFF Film Review
Bertrand Bonello‘s The Beast seems to be a rather divisive piece of work. A lot of people I know enjoyed it a lot but it never clicked into place for me.
Set in 2044, Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) undergoes a procedure to purify her DNA to rid her of past memories, traumas and emotions. During this process, she revisits some of her past lives; as a pianist in Belle Époque Paris in 1910 and as a model/actress in Los Angeles in 2014. Gabrielle, who cannot shake the premonition that something terrible is going to happen, always ends up encountering Louis (George MacKay) in one way or another.
The Beast is structurally all over the place and bounces around these three timelines haphazardly. There isn’t a smooth flow between the scenes and they don’t gel particularly well together. The film opens with sequences from the 2014 and 1910 storylines, so we aren’t introduced to the DNA purification context for a while. I was confused for a long time and struggled to put it all together because the explanation was withheld from us and not super clear.
I liked a lot of the scenes and there were plenty of good ideas and images but they didn’t amount to a satisfying whole. This is probably because they were edited together in a scattershot and deliberately baffling way. Also, the film is far too long at 2 hours and 26 minutes and some of the story arcs started to drag.
Thankfully, Seydoux was a compelling lead with a magnetic presence. I was particularly captivated by her in the 2014 storyline, possibly because I could relate to it more. MacKay, replacing the late Gaspard Ulliel, impressed me with his French, considering he didn’t speak it before the movie, and gave a committed performance as a dangerous incel vlogger in the LA story.
While The Beast boasts strong performances and awesome isolated scenes, it was a struggle to make sense of and therefore not for me.
Seen at the London Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday 31st May