Review: The Beast

Image courtesy of Janus Films.

Henry James' 1903 short story "The Beast in the Jungle" features a character who tells a friend that he lives in constant fear of an unknown catastrophe that he believes will upend his life. It is not the beast that paralyzes him, but rather his fear of it. Fear itself may not be the only thing that the characters in director Bertrand Bonello's mesmerizing new film, "The Beast," may have to fear, as plenty of catastrophes befall the two lead characters during three different time periods. But fear has undoubtedly immobilized them.

Using James' concept - but certainly not the story itself - as a jumping-off point, Bonello's film is a surreal, unsettling, and visually and conceptually dazzling story about two people's inability to connect over a period of about 130 years. The two characters are played by Lea Seydoux and George MacKay, and the nature of their relationships in the various time periods vacillates greatly.

But first, the film opens on what appears to be Bonello himself directing Seydoux, possibly playing herself. She stands in front of a green screen and the director tells her to imagine something that has paralyzed her with fear. Seydoux lets out a bloodcurdling scream and she suddenly breaks up into thousands of pixels as we fade into the first of the three stories.

One story in particular - set in 2044 - acts as the framing device, in which we start and gradually come back to every once in a while. In that story, AI has seemingly taken over after humanity nearly destroyed itself with a catastrophic war. Seydoux's character in this story is in the middle of a process during which AI helps her undergo a "DNA purge," which removes negative memories of the past or even, in this case, past lives. Hence, the two different time periods of previous lives in which Seydoux's character seemingly existed as different people.

The first time period is 1910 during the Paris floods. Seydoux plays the unhappy wife of a doll manufacturer - once again giving Bonello the ability to play around with one of his favorite visual motifs: dolls and mannequins - who gets involved in what is at least an emotional affair - if not more - with an Englishman (MacKay). The film's first hour operates at a measured pace as these two begin to see more of each other. The story culminates in a tragedy during a fire at the doll factory during which the pair must flee by swimming through a flooded basement, a visually stunning sequence that features dolls floating by as the pair try to find an escape route.

A creepy talking doll pops up in the second story, which is set in Los Angeles in 2014, where Seydoux is an aspiring actress/model who is house sitting for a rich person in the Hollywood hills. At night, she goes out alone to nightclubs, which are the most eerily shot sequences at such places in recent memory. There's some beautiful nighttime photography in this sequence as Gabrielle (Seydoux) drives alone down the Sunset Strip and haunting overhead shots of the city go a long way in creating atmosphere.

In the first story, Seydoux went to see a medium to talk about her paralyzing fear, and was told that a pigeon entering her home could be seen as a bad omen. Sure enough, not only does one enter her home in 1910, but it also attacks her. In 2014, the bird makes an appearance and its brutalized carcass is later found in the driveway. 

In the 2014 story, Gabrielle enlists the help of an online psychic, an unsettling woman who appears to think something bad is heading Gabrielle's way. Sure enough, that bad thing is MacKay's Louis Lewansky, a 30-year-old incel who hates women because of his belief that they never give him a chance. He has taken to stalking Gabrielle throughout L.A., often parking his car and sitting on the lawn outside her home.

If the film's first hour is intentionally languid, its second is unbearably intense. Bonello makes great use of Los Angeles as a noir epicenter. The neon-tinted nighttime scenes are frighteningly dreamy and there's a long sequence toward this story's end in which Gabrielle believes an intruder is in the house that is among the scariest scenes I've seen in some time.

Bonello has long been a director of surreal arthouse thrillers such as "Zombi Child" and "Nocturama," and he doesn't attempt to hide his influences in "The Beast." These include everything from giallos and "Titanic" to, naturally, David Lynch. The 2014 story draws some obvious inspiration from Lynch's masterpiece "Mulholland Drive," from its portrayal of Los Angeles as a terrifying dreamscape to a scene in which Gabrielle obsessively watches a TV karaoke show in which someone lip syncs to Roy Orbison's "Evergreen."

Beyond that, "The Beast" is Lynchian in that rather concerning itself too much with the details of plot, it often feels as if it's following dream logic, and there's a free-floating atmosphere of doom throughout the film that reminded me of other L.A.-set Lynch films, namely "Lost Highway" and "Inland Empire." A scene toward the end is set at a bar that gave off "Twin Peaks" vibes and the film's culmination might have been inspired by that TV show's third season finale.

It's during the final sequence - in which we're back in 2044 - that Seydoux's character again speaks with the latest iteration of MacKay's character. He broaches the subject of their love - in the present as well as in past lives - and it results in Seydoux letting out a bloodcurdling scream similar to the one at the beginning in front of the green screen. Is it love itself that's the subject of her foreboding? Is the beast simply living in fear of truly connecting with someone else - or rather, being unable to connect?

"There must be beautiful things in this chaos," says Gabrielle to her stalker. But can we recognize these beautiful things if we live paralyzed by fear, something that seems all too real in 2024 and beyond as we possibly face a future similar to that depicted in the film's 2044 section, where AI requires that mankind blot out all that is human? I'm not sure "The Beast" is a film that can be - or is even meant to be - truly comprehended. Regardless, it's the first great movie of the year.