by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Dasha Nekrasova, Elina Löwensohn, Guslagie Malanda
Intro:
… the in-depth braininess of the script and the sublime film craft (Anita Roth’s editing during the final act is bonkers in all the right ways) create a compelling and challenging experience for those willing to step into the cage.
The Beast In The Jungle, a novella written by Henry James in 1903, is a story about fear. Fear that whatever good things can exist in life are both fleeting and prelude to a fall, and how ruminating on that possibility can shut us off from feeling much of anything at all.
The Beast, the latest film from French idiosyncrat Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent, House of Tolerance) takes that framework and gives it the Cloud Atlas treatment, crafting his own shattered nesting doll mosaic that extrapolates that intimate framing of emotional distance onto a societal level.
From its Brechtian green-screen introduction, the film sets up an atmosphere of terror at what we do not know is there, spread across three different time periods and genres: a costume drama romance in Paris 1914 which occupies much of the first half, a glitchy domestic thriller in Los Angeles 2014 which makes up the bulk of the second, and the philosophical sci-fi framing story set in 2044 that is interspersed throughout.
The main sci-fi conceit is Buddhism by way of Assassin’s Creed, with Léa Seydoux’s Gabrielle reliving past lives as a means of emotionally ‘purifying’ herself to become a ‘better’ worker (echoing Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor), and repeatedly encountering a potential soulmate (George MacKay’s Louis) in the process.
With the emphasis on an A.I.-dominated future, it proffers a dark side to Spike Jonze’s Her in its reiteration of the fleeting preciousness of true joy, albeit with a contrasting perspective on how technology affects the acquisition of it. Along with being a timely interpretation of the titular Beast and the omen of disaster that it cast over the original story, it also mingles with some of the reality-bending textures to offer sly commentary on the state of the film industry and its own modern-day anxieties (a lot of which have historically been fuelled by its own tales of technology run amok). From there, it takes that initial fear of going from an ecstatic high to a depressive low and constructs a society that considers the latter to not be worth the former, effectively making dolls of the human race.
As the three timelines bleed into each other and a few nightmare scenarios are acted out concerning the dangers of getting close to others, Bonello’s direction, script, and soundtrack manage to keep everything on the rails. Something of a feat, considering it can and will shift from a stuffy period piece, to George MacKay doing his best Elliot Rodger affectation, complete with quoting post-genocide Anakin Skywalker from Attack Of The Clones, while Seydoux is getting jumpscared by Trash Humpers. [Allow a short indulgence in writing all that out to ensure that it was indeed real and not the product of a fever dream]; this is the kind of film that can make one question what they’re experiencing.
All jokes aside, as sprawling and jarring as this film frequently is, there’s something truly captivating about how The Beast maps out its incredibly fatalistic slant on the modern world. It’s like a really long, really good Black Mirror episode, right down to what might be the single coldest credits sequence in any modern film. It’s quite demanding of the audience’s time, attention span, and ability to coast along the tonal shifts, but the in-depth braininess of the script and the sublime film craft (Anita Roth’s editing during the final act is bonkers in all the right ways) create a compelling and challenging experience for those willing to step into the cage.