With ideas of love, death, and a modernist interpretation of Buddhist reincarnation splayed out across 150 years, Bertrand Bonello’s wide ranging sci-fi romantic epic The Beast (2023) is a sprawling and fascinating film that somehow leaves you wanting more.
A film born of countless fascinating artistic and narrative choices, The Beast is stretched and pulled across multiple lifetimes and styles, from a modern-day LA, a 2044 future setting of all-consuming AI and monotony, and a love story set amongst the 1910 Paris flood. At the centre of it all is Gabrielle Monnier, played by the extraordinary Léa Seydoux. From an Age of Innocence (1993) inspired period drama centring on Gabrielle as a concert pianist, to a futurist worker being asked to wipe to purge her DNA of the memories and anxieties of her previous lives by AI overlords. Concluding finally with Gabrielle as a lonely LA actress trying to find her place in the world, The Beast is an unwieldy art house film that brings to mind the great films of David Lynch and Brian De Palma at its most kinetic, while struggling to leave a mark of its own in the space.
The film focuses on Gabrielle’s internalised fear and anxieties of an unknown catastrophe that she believes is just around the corner. This well understood anxiety that Gabrielle feels bleeds into her many lives, resulting in a profound loneliness and paralysis that impacts her on a near cellular level.
While The Beast is centred on the many lives of Gabrielle and her compounding dread and anxiety across lifetimes, she is not alone in this experience. Passing through her life as a seemingly literal soulmate is Louis Lewanski (the surprisingly bilingual George Mackay) as a 20th Century bon vivant, a fellow future worker being asked to purge their DNA, and in an intriguingly jarring shift, a present-day incel with potentially violent ideations. The second half of the film weaponises this shift in temperament and character, moving from an ephemeral sense of peril and anxiety to something keenly modern and grounded that electrifies these once placid waters.
Where films like Mulholland Drive (2001) and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004) succeed in finding the intimate in the existential, Bonello’s film fluctuates wildly between the two emotional states, only rarely succeeding in finding this balance. The filmmaker clearly has a penchant for pretence which is occasionally buoyed by artistic risk-taking and playfulness, particularly in its modern setting, but the decision to spend an hour of semi-build-up to this place is confounding, making even the most alluring moments of the film felt at a befuddled remove.
But a 150-minute art film predominantly focused on Lea Seydoux’s wide expressions and emotions will never be an unengaging feature, even if there are valleys that under normal circumstances would derail the whole experience. Luckily, however, The Beast’s total commitment and unique narrative keeps one on the hook. Bonello has faith in his sharply drawn concepts on how an individual’s past impacts their future, shown through inventive filmmaking swings, which makes up for the loosely flowing structure of the screenplay, a faith that is justified more often than not.
Whether Gabrielle is unique in this feeling of past lives reverberating through her present is unknown to us, but we are given a strong sense that these other characters from the future setting have a similar sensation as they continue to inhabit these nostalgic clubs. Nostalgic events and content having purpose due to people’s past lives echoing forward into their future selves is a compelling notion situated tightly within this beast of a film.
A film both manic and mannered like The Beast, while inventive, ultimately arrives with a lack of kineticism to consistently work across its extended run time. The film will certainly improve across multiple viewings due to its mysterious narrative and entrancing chemistry between Seydoux and Mackay, with the depth of concepts and emotional stakes we crave from these sorts of wild cinematic swings.
The back end is brimming with a watered down but still palpable Lynchian dread and unease that breathes new life into the film. The closing sequences of the film wield a carnal heartbreak that will linger long in the mind of the audience. A profound feeling of past mistakes and inactions being placed at the doorstep of our future selves is the sort of existential dread found all too rarely in science fiction horror, a realm where The Beast emerges triumphant.
The Beast is in select theatres now.
Rating Frames 