For Bertrand Bonello , movies are like rubber band : They ’re mean to be stretched as far as they ’ll go . The Beast , the French writer - director ’s latest , spans eras , continents , language , and genre . It is , at lower limit , three pic in one , with enough preoccupations for many more still . Bonello loves to collapse time and space . His rapturousHouse of Pleasuresused anachronistic pop and a parting , dissentious flash - forward to link one century ’s sex activity work to another ’s , while hisZombi Childpossessed a modernistic Parisian coming - of - old age dramatic event with the sprightliness of midcentury Haitian revulsion . Conceptually speaking , those were but prelude to the audacious potpourri he ’s made this time . The full galaxy - nous aspiration ofThe Beastcould not be anticipated .
As it turn out , an inability to call is what Bonello is drive at here , at least in part . uneasiness about a future that is strange certainly ghost Gabrielle , his chronologically trifurcated heroine , dally by French film star andformer Bond girlLéa Seydoux . “ Can you get frightened by something that ’s not actually here ? ” a filmmaker require her during an acting auditory modality . Standing against a wall to the full drape in green projection screen , he ’s talk about the power to convincingly react to nothing — an all - too - necessary skillset for performers of the 21st hundred . For Gabrielle , this is not a big ask . She has , after all , spend multiple lifetimes fascinate by fear of something that ’s not actually there . That ’s the beast of the claim , though psychologists know it by a different name .
The movie opens on a soundstage , a backdrop of green , in what change by reversal out to be a flashback of kind . The present tense ofThe Beastis the future — specifically , a serenely dystopian 2044 see by AI and define by a froward movement toward blur emotion . Bonello ’s conception of this cutting human race is suggestively sparse : bare rooms shroud in darkness , eerily depopulated streets , fashion and interior plan not easy identified by decennium . Less can be more when you ’re trying to image tomorrow on a budget ; as a fillip , the black - box minimalism and lack of technological particular guarantee thatThe Beastwon’t appear hopelessly out-of-date six months from now .
Guided by a disembodied computer overlord vocalise by fellow filmmaker Xavier Dolan — an factor that recallsAlphaville , a golden standard for resourcefully makingnowfeel likelater — Gabrielle submits to “ purification . ” This faintly Lacuna Inc - like therapy allows patients to get at memories of past lives to scrub their very desoxyribonucleic acid of bad feelings . Through the unconscious process , Gabrielle discovers her secret association to a openhanded unknown she ’s just met , Louis ( 1917 ’s George MacKay , in a part originally intended for Bonello ’s lateSt . Laurentstar Gaspard Ulliel ) . It flex out the two really met in another lifespan , in the France of 1910 , when she was a married musician and he a dashing suitor . Their tentative wooing , pussyfoot around the edges of indiscretion , allows Bonello to do his own version of Edith Wharton — a miniature costume dramatic event elegantly shoot on 35 mm .
The dialog during these rattling scenes replacement between French and English , sometimes almost as a means of inflection , reflecting pernicious transformation in the seductive billing between the two . Some of it is borrowed from the improbable source fabric : the 1903 Henry James novellaThe Beast in the Jungle , about a gentleman’s gentleman caught in a ego - fulfil prophecy , so blind by his certainty that bad luck await him that he fails to really go ( which is , of course of study , the bad luck he fears ) . To say that this is a loose adjustment would be to put it lightly ; more than just flipping the sex of the stricken part , Bonello expands the story outwards into a odd science fiction triptych . But its tragedy remain visible through the metaphysical layers . Much of it breathe on Seydoux , the rare forward-looking movie superstar with a timeless glamour , equally at home in an opera house of the former 1900s and a bump nightclub of the debased 2010s .
Speaking of which , The Beasteventually leaps into the Los Angeles of 2014 , when Gabrielle is now an shoot for actress . Louis , meanwhile , has been converted as an embittered Virgo the Virgin ; his rancor is like an echo of the rejection he experienced a century earlier across the ocean . Bonello models this new version of the character onElliot Rodger , the deal shooterwho killed six people during a violent disorder near the University of California , Santa Barbara . MacKay , delivering a close imitation of that genuine - lifespan killer ’s misogynisticYouTubemusings , chillingly taps into the entitlement and self - pity of incel martyrdom . What ’s skittish - in effect about the performance is how you could still see glimmers of the romantic MacKay plays in the turn - of - the - 100 scenes . He create a continuity of grapheme across two very unlike specimen of blue - nut bachelorhood .
Marked by a few stilted bit performances and a hypnotically repetitive cycle , this approximate - present-day stretch of the motion picture — a trance sneak thriller in the City of Angels — is at once awkward and nightmarish . The two qualities are perhaps related , even inextricable . Does it say something about the unreal nature of advanced life history that the view closest to “ present day ” are the least convincing ? Bonello ’s scantily period - art object vision of a Hollywood of casting calls , callous night life , and television - call psychic evoke a time interpret from English to French and then back again . While so much fabrication paint the early twentieth hundred as an age of repression , Bonello intriguingly upends convention by depicting the humanity of the yesteryear as more emotionally open than the present .
Just as motif iterate across the film ’s timelines — dame , pigeon , and fortune tellers make multiple visual aspect — there ’s a déjà vu character to much ofThe Beastitself . Befitting its laptop computer - eld flourish , itsometimes suggest a gonzo supercut , as if Bonello were filtering past - life reveries of the past likeCloud Atlas , The Fountain , and2046through the velvet apprehension ofDavid Lynch . ( The ending , when a waltz in a red room shatters into screaming distress , is deeplyTwin Peaks - coded . ) All the same , Bonello ’s fashion with unnerving atmosphere is his own . The movie ’s climax , a fated reunification of alienated kindred sprightliness that plays out in a vulnerable methamphetamine star sign on the border of showbiz , is like a shuddering psychic aftershock of the director ’s masterpiece , Nocturama . Here , as in that terrorist - in - Paris incitation , Bonello warps fourth dimension , change by reversal the suspensive final scenes into a buffering , jump glitch in the feed .
“ It ’s very inventive , but it ’s hard to find the emotion in it , ” someone tell of a piece of music early on . For some , that may be true ofThe Beast , too : It ’s easier to admire the morphological ploy of the motion-picture show — to marvel at the scope of its musical genre - blending , century - jumping architecture — than to be draw into its melodrama . But peradventure that ’s just a reflection of the hesitancy at the heart of the story . After 150 years , will these two finally become one ? Or are they intend to keep go each other like ship in the night ? For all Gabrielle ’s odyssey of alterative remembrance recalls a library of renascence romances , Bonello ’s real subject is n’t love but the ways we psychologically surround ourselves off from it . Passion fades with time . It ’s our defence mechanism and the anxiousness undergirding them that are truly build to last .
