The Beast review: Sci-fi movies don’t get purer than this

Review of The Beast comes from the film’s screenings at the 2023 New York Film Festival.

On paper, the premise of Bertrand Bonello’s new science fiction movie La BêteIf you want to know more about. The BeastIt is relatively simple to understand. In 2044, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is on the verge of undergoing a “purification” procedure to purge her DNA of the experiences, emotions, and traumas of her past lives from 2014 and 1910. But first, she must relive each of them vividly.

It’s a time-travel story of sorts, but it begins out of time and outside its own fictional reality, opening with a voice from off screen (Bonello himself) directing Seydoux in an enormous green-screen room. As Seydoux, knife gripped tightly in hand, cowers from some unseen beast, this prologue sets the stage for images and abstract ideas that recur throughout the movie’s various timelines, from the terror of this encounter itself to themes of how simulacrums of reality evolve over time, and how the past becomes pastiche. Gabrielle is plagued by an invisible evil that follows her through three lives.

It’s a strange, oblique adaptation of Henry James’ 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” retaining only the overwhelming dread and depression James’ protagonist John Marcher feels, which prevents him from fully living and embracing romance until it’s far too late. There have been several movie versions over the past decade — a Brazilian one in 2017, a Dutch one in 2019, and an Austrian one released earlier in 2023, which transposes the story’s setting to a nightclub between 1979 and 2004. But rather than copying the core premise of the short story, Bonello’s French- and English-language adaptation uses James’ dense, descriptive prose to weave detailed textures and sensations in each of his timelines.

While the movie’s three settings are nominally connected by the lives Gabrielle has lived, The Beast isn’t concerned with the hows and whys of reincarnation and recollection across time. Bonello takes an approach that is very Bollywood to the subject of rebirth. As long as actors portray the same character in each incarnation, Bonello expects audiences will draw the appropriate connections.

The ability to project is essential. The BeastThe emotional impact of a movie depends entirely on the viewer. It is not as lax as the typical arthouse Rorschach. The lavish 1910 time frame, which is set in Parisian Aristocracy sees Gabrielle, an English musician who also makes dolls, meet a mysterious Englishman (George MacKay) and learn that the two of them shared a special secret years earlier, back when they both were different. The film could as easily have taken place in a completely different era. Doublespeak is used from the beginning to tell this story about past lives and new births. The literal and metaphorical exist in such close proximity that they’re indecipherable. That linguistic sleight of hand also applies to Louis’ flirtations: Gabrielle asks him whether they spoke French or English in this past encounter. He replies, “We mixed tongues.”

It’s easy to get swept up in their repressed romance, but all the while, Gabrielle speaks of some tragedy that’s set to befall her, like a beast waiting for her in the jungle, ready to annihilate her. With the benefit of hindsight, that might have been a premonition — could she have foreseen the first World War, or perhaps the Great Flood of Paris in 1910? — but this nebulous sense of doom never fades. Gabrielle, in 1910 or in the future versions who will live in 2044 and 2014 are not immune to this nebulous sense of doom. Bonello’s story is splintered across three different timelines to place the anxiety that comes with being alive within a larger historical context. Today, threats of climate change and war aren’t all that different from what Gabrielle would have lived with in the 1910s, a looming possibility of annihilation that both drives and stifles people in their everyday lives.

The 2044 plot reflects some of the anxieties of the time. It depicts a Paris of the future where all the jobs have been taken over by AI. Gas masks are required to walk the streets, people are forced to wear beige or gray, and they are encouraged not show their true emotions in order for them become better workers. It’s the film’s only segment shot in a narrow 4:3 aspect ratio (the rest of it is in 1.85:1, closer to an HD television), as if technology had shrunk the borders of human possibility.

For Gabrielle to move up in her career, she must confront — and if she so chooses, erase — the traumas of her past, which she accesses through a spine-chilling method involving a needle in her ear as she floats in a black liquid. This is a process the future timeline’s Louis is strongly considering too, if it means professional mobility. The two cross paths when they are evaluating their careers. How this recollection technique actually works is a mystery, but it feels both visceral and primordial, and while the two past timelines are technically memories, they aren’t approached with the traditional cinematic hallmarks of flashbacks, like literal flashes, match-cuts, echoes of dialogue, or similar tricks. The flashbacks unfold as vividly as the so-called present; the film’s 2044 scenes aren’t an anchor so much as an oblique framing device to explore tales of art, repression, and violence across the decades.

Although the segments set in 1910 are constructed in a romantic manner, scenes in modern Los Angeles in 2014 have been shattered and show a hint of surrealism. (It isn’t quite David Lynch’s LA, but it’s hardly naturalistic.) Gabrielle has a dream of becoming an actress, but Louis is just a frustrated incel who is always on the lookout for girls. His videos are initially funny but become increasingly disturbing. They remind us of Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, who in 2014 went on an anti-feminist shooting spree.

As Louis and Gabrielle’s lives tangle, so do several other elements from all three timelines, from secondary characters to familiar lines of dialogue to dolls that become increasingly animated and human across the decades. Eventually, the film’s 2014 chronology builds to a deadly crescendo on par with a tightly wound horror film. Through anticipation and repetition, the intensity of this climax is intensified, highlighting how we are all so close to losing our humanity.

The Beast’s three timelines play with seemingly unmixable genres: a classic period romance, a gripping horror-thriller, and dystopian sci-fi. Bonello unites them both aesthetically, and also emotionally. By using long, thoughtful close-ups, Bonello creates the feeling of loneliness and isolation in time.

Photo: Kinology

And yet the movie feels like it’s constantly pulsating and alive during each and every scene. That’s a form of cinematic self-justification; as the possibility of “purification” looms, so does the idea that each of these experiences, from love and joy to loss and agony, will be lost like tears in the rain. As the Gabrielle of 2044 relives upsetting moments from 1910 and 2014, she’s compelled, by an unseen voice just off screen — most characters in this future are disembodied voices, only semi-human — to not let them affect her, and to dull her senses. But there is, perhaps, nothing more disturbing than the idea that human beings shouldn’t be disturbed by the atrocities around them.

French actor Gaspard Ulliel (Moon KnightLouis was set to be played by before he died in a ski accident aged 37. In dedicating The BeastBonello’s Ulliel creates an eerie frame of memory and tragedy around the very idea that it exists, bringing reality into his fiction, as he did with his green-screen opening sequence. This film unfolds with abstract editing and sounds that form an odd glue between the three time frames. However, it invites real life into its technological and emotional considerations. The Beast doesn’t bother exploring the scientific nuts and bolts of its premise, but in a deconstructive sense, it’s as purely sci-fi as cinema gets. The music and images bind the present and the future in a way that is both stirring and thought-provoking.

Bonello has created a microcosmic film that perfectly captures life, with all of its pleasures and pains, at the brink of oblivion. In Bonello’s version of the present, trapped characters in a world where emotion and experience are not valued make frequent visits to clubs which play music dating back decades. One joint keeps changing its theme (including its dress code) from the 1960s to the ’70s and ’80s, reflecting the ways the past is filtered and fractured through the prism of the present. But what tethers even these imitations of eras together is people’s desire to live as their forebears once did, and to break through the surface of each pastiche to find real lived experience, driven by music and movement.

It is also a good description. The Beast. It is the musical compositions by Bonello and Anna Bonello, and the soundtrack of captivating classics that creates a rhythmic energy which binds disparate tales of love and solitude into a piercing, complete story. Camera follows characters in hallways, around corners and through a variety of situations until they finally find one another. All this culminates in one of the most terrifying moments of anguish ever put to film, courtesy of Seydoux’s pained and deeply vulnerable performance, which is sure to burn its way into the audience’s subconscious and live with them long after. The film echoes like a private experience of another lifetime. It is impossible to forget.

Janus/Sideshow bought The Beast NYFF is planning to release its first album soon. Polygon’s review will be updated when the release date is confirmed.