THE BEAST: An Unnerving Collage of Henry James, Sci-Fi, and Angry Young Men

Director Bertrand Bonello‘s The Beast, co-written with Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit, is purportedly inspired by a Henry James novella. The Beast in The Jungle is about a man beset with loneliness and fears of a fatalistic event likened to an unseen beast haunting him. His primary talking partner is a lady he never allows to get too close to him, thus pulling her into his aloof orbit.

In the film’s hook, bearing only a passing resemblance to Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, a woman (Léa Seydoux) resolves to “purify” her DNA: The procedure will effectively go through her lineage and expunge all the strongest emotions present there.

The first segment echoes James’s work replete with the period trappings and the tete-a-tete between an elegantly dressed musician Gabrielle (Seydoux) and her counterpart Louis (George MacKay).

It’s hard not to see the similarities with Pandora and The Flying Dutchman, a bewitching Technicolor cross-dimensional romance starring Ava Gardner and James Mason at the height of their powers. Albeit the earlier film is a more straightforward, star-crossed romance.

Likewise, in the French tradition, there’s some of the obliqueness of Alain Resnais‘s Last Year at Marienbad as we systematically cut through timelines without a lot of concrete reason to grab hold of. Also, the contemporary sci-fi elements feel like they owe a debt to Jean-Luc Godard‘s Alphaville aesthetic wherein 1960s Paris became a futuristic canvas.

In the year 2044 Gabrielle is looked after by a kind of robot nanny (Guslagie Malanda) and frequents a local club that morphs into a new decade of fashion and music every time she shows up. It’s also another fated meeting place to find Louis.

So The Beast‘s not trafficking in entirely unprecedented ideas, and I’m often less generous to a film of this length because it can feel a bit indulgent. It’s very much a vision of form over content; although even if you consider this an impediment, it’s still an intriguing cipher to try and pry apart. Because there’s a lot offered up for our senses from clairvoyants to “The Holy Spirit” embodied by a pigeon, water, fire, earthquakes, and a pervasive motif of dolls and the Pygmalion-like implications of this.

All Hail Léa Seydoux

It would be highly uncharitable to call The Beast a sizzle reel of Léa Seydoux’s greatest hits, but that’s only to say across time and space and genres and contexts, she’s an entirely magnetic figure at the center of it all. If I can get away with calling her timeless, I will because she seems to fit so seamlessly, even casually, into each new reality created around her. She just exists and acts and emotes as if she has only ever done it this way.

On the shoulders of her appeal, with her and MacKay code-switching back and forth between French and English, something is latent within the movie that’s worthwhile even if it’s primarily a showcase for the performances and the mise en scene. 

I remained open toward The Beast, because what would movies be if we understood every frame? There would be no room for art or ambiguity or perplexity. These are some of the film’s greatest, most necessary aspects. And yet it couldn’t totally assuage my misgivings or rather it sparked them more than I was expecting. 

A Troubling Fiction

The movie effectively lost me with its turn at the midpoint, and these are my own reservations since it touched on wounds that still felt tender. The ensuing creative decisions came off as callous even if they weren’t intended as such. I’m also apprehensive that these choices might be misunderstood by unfamiliar viewers.

In 2014 a young man disenchanted with his life — completely lonely and angry in his isolation — lashed out and killed some young women in Santa Barbara, California. The events still leave an imprint because I was a student at that time with friends attending the school and living in the neighborhood where this all happened. There were tears, dialogue around media coverage, and prayer vigils on numerous campuses in solidarity.

It’s so obvious watching the film, from the mentioned location to the date and the modus operandi of the young man (also portrayed by MacKay), that it’s patterned off this real-life tragedy. There’s nothing inherently wrong in creating fictionalized accounts like this, but it perturbed me to watch such a horrific real-life event slotted into the broader collage of a genre piece.

Obviously, the ambitions are grand and there’s the perceived connective tissue of this debilitating male loneliness from James’s novel personified in the contemporary landscape. In one way the puzzle pieces fit together, and still, in another, they seem to betray the rest of the movie.

Far from somehow redeeming the moment (I’m not always a fan of Tarantino revisionist history though it has its perks), it feels like we are left in a similarly bleak space. Because while others might see it only as a simulacrum of our contemporary culture to fit alongside salons, opera houses, and AI-driven futures, this one moment was one I actually lived through.

Somehow the cadence feels off and out of step with the kind of time-spanning exploration the movie is going for. If the movie is a mirror, when you put it under scrutiny, maybe what you see says more about the viewer than the movie itself. I cannot say for certain.

Conclusion: The Beast

We close with a spiraling David Lynchian fever dream ending played against the familiar voice of Roy Orbison. It’s hard not to draw unflattering parallels to Blue Velvet. It either descends or ascends (depending on how you view it) into a kind of debilitating conclusion. If it’s not catharsis, then it’s the kind of denouement we expected all along.

On a different day, The Beast might easily be characterized as a beautiful, glorious mess of the film, but I couldn’t get the residual bitter taste out of my mouth. Try as I might, I have yet to have my own strong emotions removed, and the film effectively worked on me in the most unnerving of ways. It came in the form of revulsion instead of mere tragic heartbreak over the lost love at its core. The jury’s still out on whether that means it’s a success or not.