New York Film Festival 2023: THE BEAST & FOE

Science fiction is a lot harder than it looks. On one end, the writers and filmmakers are free to create their own world, establish anything they want and have it be in service of the ideas they are in pursuit of. However, that very freedom can hinder the film’s focus. Either the film struggles to create an internal logic in its universe, or it ends up circling around its thematic ideas over and over and fails to arrive at a resolution. Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast and Garth Davis’ Foe both use the science fiction genre to tackle human themes like connection and intimacy in a relationship, both with mixed results.

The Beast – Bertrand Bonello

Inspired by Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, The Beast centers on Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and the powerful connection she shares with a man named Louis (George MacKay) across multiple periods of time, from 1910 to 2014 to the AI-driven future of 2044. As we uncover bits of information from each time period (through brilliant albeit dizzy editing), we learn that in 2044, human emotion is regarded as an unpredictable and thus dangerous element to a productive society. In that future, Gabrielle agrees to “purify her DNA,” which is a process that makes her experience all the most traumatic events in her past lives to rid herself of her feelings – this is the context of what we are seeing in the 1910 and 2014 periods.

Though the premise and the concept on how technology slowly controls our lives are both admirable and fascinating, Bonello’s approach in execution leaves much to be desired. For one, the respective storylines lack a forward propulsive momentum. The 1910 arc sees beautiful production design and mysterious charismatic energy between Seydoux and MacKay, but is mostly conflict-free. The 2014 arc touches on the disturbing trend of young isolated women targeted by incels (in a hilarious turn by MacKay), but it doesn’t lead to any stark commentary on how we got here or how we could avoid it.

Most of all, these storylines are stitched together in the editing room, in attempt to convey some sort of continuous emotional throughline in the same vein as David Lynch’s take on Cloud Atlas. But the film fails to identify the most suspenseful or climactic moment in each storyline to find that emotional connection to cut from one story to another. Instead, The Beast finds hard visuals to cut from one to another. Remember when Seydoux picked up the knife in that one timeline? Watch her pick up a knife the same exact way in this one! That makes them connected, right?

The Beast is not without its strengths. Seydoux carries the entire film on her shoulders, as she weaves in and out of different versions of Gabrielle, all while navigating a constant state of confusion with empathy. Even when the material is unfocused, she can find every corner of her character for the scene. MacKay also demonstrates great versatility, ranging from a gentleman to a troubled incel. His dialogue exchanges with Seydoux are some of his best moments in the film, even when his character of Louis is often written off as surface-level.

Despite the excellent performances, the direction, and the production design, The Beast never clicked with me. With such a tedious execution on fascinating ideas, the film tiredly spins in circles without truly saying something impactful.

Foe – Garth Davis

Another sci-fi novel to film adaptation is Foe, which takes place in a world not too far away from Interstellar, in which the Earth has mostly dried up, and resources are scarce for humanity. Alone and secluded far away from civilization is Hen (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal), a married couple whose quiet life is turned upside down when a stranger arrives and offers them a troubling proposal – Junior will be sent away to a large space station colony (think Elysium).

So what if Junior doesn’t want to go? What happens to Hen, who is left alone on Earth? These logistical questions are all important not just in a narrative sense, but also a world-building sense, but this is where Foe struggles. It’s not that the script doesn’t answer these questions. We learn that Junior cannot reject the offer, as being sent to the space colony is through a similar executive decision as being drafted for a war. As for Hen, she is to be accompanied by a clone of Junior. It is essentially a replicant (the film’s introductory text calls it a “simulant”). The problem all comes down to tone.

Before Foe introduces even a shred of science fiction, director Garth Davis focuses on the marriage itself. We know there is something wrong between Hen and Junior, and things are not the way they used to be. With beautifully shot barren landscapes and occasional flashes of “another life” Hen and Junior used to have, Davis creates an atmosphere that feels right out of a Terrence Malick music video. There are some moments where even the score seems to borrow the same exact chords used by Hans Zimmer for the Interstellar score. All together, on a technical level, you can tell that Davis sought out to make Foe feel as profound as possible. As a result, none of it even comes close to being tonally aligned with dialogue about robots and space stations.

Nearly every answer the stranger (Aaron Pierre) gives to Hen and Junior arrived with laughter from the audience. The dialogue is too often delivered in a matter-of-fact way, almost nonchalantly, it clashes with Davis’ visual language every time.

The rest of the film unfolds in a frustrating manner, in which the conflict between Hen and Junior is constantly kept vague. There’s little backstory, little contextual information. One scene would have tension between husband and wife, and immediately in the next scene, the conflict is nonexistent. Instead of revealing its hand transparently so it has the room to dive into its characters’ headspace, Foe keeps the audience distant from its two leads, while leaning into melodramatic tropes to build narrative momentum. Over time, Junior becomes more and more agitated and distraught, as Mescal gives an over-the-top hammy performance, with no one else in the cast to play off of. For once, I can feel his frustration. Meanwhile, the sci-fi elements come in and out of the film – you would frequently forget that this is in fact a movie that involves AI robots and off-world space colonies.

And then Foe arrives at its big twist, and everything begins to make sense, but not in a narrative way. It begins to make sense why the rest of the movie has so many narrative holes, why it has little to no handling on what its main conflict is and what the character backstory is to establish such conflict. There’s a reason why this character-study movie does not give us a chance to study the characters. It’s the quintessential example of a movie completely built around its twist, thus forcing the script to withhold information from the audience until it’s time for the big reveal. In the meantime, the script has no way of filling that void aside from resorting to melodrama.

Davis approaches this story with great sensitivity. From the rustic but old interiors of the farm house to the bleak desolate lands of a dying Earth, the film is so engrossed in making itself look and feel beautiful and heartfelt. But it is all off-sync with the writing, which is more unintentionally funny and frustratingly vague than serious and insightful. Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal try their absolute best with this material, but one silly twist and four endings later, you’re just begging for this relationship, and the film, to be over.