FILM REVIEW: "The Beast's" convoluted hot-people-parade winds up lost in its own ambition
Bertrand Bonello has had a long career of telling sleek, sexy science-fiction stories, and while The Beast certainly isn’t the end for him, it isn’t a highlight. The opening 20 minutes are dynamic, sort of a one-take party scene, but it sets hopes up for a much fuller film than it turns out to be. After this, burnout pervades the plot as it piles more and more onto its plate without the momentum to deliver. The leads (Léa Seydoux, George Mackay) seem uncomfortably forced together to deliver an overly abstract script within excessively layered storylines which run at variable pacing in barely intelligible sequences. It half-uses repetition to give the effect of déjà vu, but this only makes the film feel half an hour too long, and for a film advertised as a psychological thriller, there’s a lot of waiting before the intrigue even begins. Indecisive between whether it’s trying to be Nolan or A24, The Beast is attempting to juggle contradictory balls.
It’s inconsistent, slightly monotonous, and doesn’t give you enough reason to care about who the characters are, much less what they represent. This idea of what they “represent” was clearly the priority in Bonello’s vision, but ultimately, abstracting his characters turns them into puppets (or Dolls) of Self, Other, and Irrelevant. If this sounds vague, that’s the idea – The Beast is making a (slightly unoriginal) point about how sanitising Humanity with technology threatens what makes our lives (specifically our relationships) significant. Once that lesson is grasped there’s still a fair bit to get through. One of the poorly balanced timelines could’ve been dropped, and because the part of the narrative set in the past is so dense, the whole thing ends up feeling fairly unbalanced.
It loses whatever momentum it strains to build, and between the use of irony and suspense, most elements of the film fail to land on their feet, save for the last ten minutes, which is an undeniably tense and exciting finale. There’s a powerful point being made about the significance of pain and anxiety as a necessity of Human existence, but it’s tied up in tech fear-mongering. The other excellent part of this film is the set and costume design. If you’re into that stuff, the film has plenty to offer. Beyond that, The Beast takes a long time to do not much.
