Even if The Beast, the new film from Bertrand Bonello, had turned out to be a gigantic mess, I have a feeling that I still would have admired it for its sheer audaciousness—here is a film that runs for approximately 146 minutes and takes gigantic swings in virtually every one of them. Happily, it proves to be anything but a mess—it is pretty much my favorite film of the year to date—as Bonello offers viewers a remarkably compelling and utterly unclassifiable work that spans three eras as it meditates on such subjects as love, sex, fate, loneliness, technology and cruelty in ways that veer from the tragic to the terrifying in a narrative high-wire act that somehow never makes a single false step.
The film is very loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle, a celebrated 1903 novella by Henry James that is generally considered to be one of his great works. In it, a man named John Marcher is reunited with May Bartram, a woman he met a decade earlier while living in Italy. Then and now, they seem perfect for each other but John is consumed with the overriding sense that he is destined to suffer some catastrophic fate. The two see each other but never progress to a romantic level and it is only at the end of his life that he finally realizes that his great misfortune was his choice to ignore May’s love and spend his existence in a constant sense of loneliness. This is a tale that could have easily been adapted into a smart and intriguing straightforward drama but that, to put it mildly, is not what Bonello has in store.
In his take, the story spans three different and intertwining eras and follows its two main characters as incarnations of the two central characters—Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) and Lous (George McKay)—go about their respective and seemingly inevitable fates. In one, set in Paris just before the Great Flood of 1910, Gabrielle is a celebrated concert pianist who is married to the owner of a doll factory. At a reception, she happens upon Louis, who she knew a decade earlier and to whom she confessed her feeling that there is a “beast” out there that will destroy her and that prevents her from seeking true love. Nevertheless, as she spends more time with Louis, she begins to fall under his spell and makes plans to leave with him and experience the sense of love that she had denied herself for so long. Spoiler Alert—it doesn’t quite work out.
In what will no doubt be seen as the most contentious section of the film, the focus moves to Los Angeles circa 2014, where Gabrielle is a struggling actress/model who is housesitting while going out on auditions in which her talents appear to be secondary to her ability to work with green screen technology that forces her to act opposite nothing. Lonely and lovelorn, she goes out into the street following an earthquake and finds herself intrigued by fellow bystander Louis. Impulsively, she starts talking to him and even invites him to walk her back to the house, an invitation that he inexplicably spurns before taking off. What she doesn’t know, though we do, is that Louis is an incel who regularly posts misogynist videos in which he rants about being a 30-year-old virgin while blaming women for not responding to him in the way that he feels he deserves. (Much of what he says is reportedly taken verbatim from videos made by Elliot Rodger, a real-life incel who did go on a killing spree in Los Angeles in 2014). Needless to say, things don’t go well.
In the remaining section, we are in 2044, a time where AI has essentially usurped humanity and those hoping for decent jobs are required to undergo a radical new procedure that is designed to purify her DNA and exorcise the demons and unhappiness that have plagued them throughout their current and past lives—the downside is that all actual human emotions tend to get wiped away in the process. Despite her misgivings, this era’s Gabrielle agrees to undergo the procedure. On a break, she visits a nearby disco—one that changes its theme year every night—where she meets this variation of Louis. Like her, he shares concerns about the procedure and the two form such an immediate connection that finds herself willing at last to make that big emotional leap. You know the drill.
A film trying to spin three overlapping, though thematically linked narratives spanning over a wide swatch of time runs the risk of devolving into what scholars refer to as “a gigantic mess,” as the Wachowskis proved with their ambitious but misfired adaptation of Cloud Atlas. Here, eras sometimes overlap and collapse upon each other—even the languages spoken switch from French to English at the drop of a hat—but Bonello and co-writers Guillaume Breaud and Benjamin Charbit have figured out a way to arrange the various timelines in a surprisingly clean and efficient manner that shows how its basic relationship plays out in different eras while discovering any number of clever ways of including recurring elements throughout to support its themes. One of the most intriguing of them is the way that it utilizes dolls as a motif for the dangers of technology. In the earliest section, Gabrielle’s husband has an advanced doll factory that nevertheless proves to be a site of doom and heartbreak for those unlucky enough to be in it at the wrong time. In the 2014 section, Gabrielle’s only companion in the house happens to be a creepy Furby-like toy and there is an intentionally absurd moment when someone suggest that she get plastic surgery, presumably to transform her undeniably extraordinary physical beauty into something more commonplace and malleable. In the last section, Gabrielle is befriended by a life-size service doll (Guslagie Malinda) and, more significantly, is encouraged to undergo a process that will essentially turn her into a doll of sorts.
Some of this is very funny, to be sure, but beyond the moments of obvious satire, The Beast is as tense and unsettling as anything that I have seen in a long time right from the opening sequence in which Gabrielle, standing in front of a green screen, is directed by an off-screen voice (done by Bonello himself, possibly in tribute to the dark screen test sequence in Brian De Palma’s underrated The Black Dahlia, in which he did the same thing) in a scene that doesn’t make much since then but which will become horrifyingly clear after a while. You would think that a film in which a story is replayed three different times might get tedious but that is not the case here. The Paris section starts off as a sophisticated drama about tempered passions—it is the section closest to what James originally wrote, with the key difference being that it is the female character convinced she is fated to never love—but grows progressively darker as it goes on before arriving at its haunting and nerve-wracking climax. By comparison, the outcome of the L.A. section seems a little more predetermined (especially if you know about its real-life inspiration) but Bonello once again manages to turn it into something genuinely gripping, at times suggesting what might have resulted if someone tried to fuse Mulholland Drive and Funny Games (complete with the temporal games both played with viewers) into one super-disturbing thing. As for the future section, all I will say is that while it takes place in a period where emotions have been all but eradicated, it concludes on arguably the darkest and most horrifying note of them all.
Bonello is able to evoke this non-stop sense of quietly foreboding tension with all the tools in his directorial box, from the always-intriguing production design to the canny musical selections that crop up in the soundtrack (including a deployment of Roy Orbison’s “Evergreen” that proves to be as disconcertingly memorable as the use of Orbison’s “In Dreams” in the equally grim Blue Velvet. Most of all, he is able to convey this with the help of his two leads, both of whom are stunning here. Seydoux is, of course, one of the finest and most versatile actresses working today (even managing to give the otherwise torpid Dune: Part Two one of its few moments of genuine juice) and this ranks among her greatest performances—over the course of the film’s extended running time, she is able to create three distinct characters while at the same time subtly suggesting the various ways in which they are linked together. As for McKay, he more than holds his own as he goes through the various incarnations of his character, even figuring out a way to give the 2014 incarnation some recognizable (and therefore more tragic) hints of humanity (at least to a point) without ever minimizing his monstrous nature. The two play amazingly well off of each other—a good thing, because if we don’t buy the chemistry between them, the entire project would collapse.
Does every single element on display in The Beast come together in the end? Perhaps not, but in a film as sprawling and ambitious as this, it would seem churlish to complain about how not every loose end is tied up or how not every one of its ideas completely pay off. However, this is a film that hits far more than it misses and when it does connect, the results are absolutely spellbinding. In the past, I have not always been sold on Bonello’s work—while I greatly admired the bizarre Zombi Child, things like House of Tolerance (2011), Saint Laurent (2014) and Nocturama (2016) have left me either cold or befuddled or both—but his direction here is so strong, confident and ambitious that I am now tempted to look back on those earlier works and see if they play differently now. You don’t necessarily need to do that right now, of course, but if you are lucky enough to have The Beast playing in a theater near you, take advantage of that gift and experience a movie that will be rattling around in your mind for a long time to come.