To love is to feel, and to feel is to suffer—truths that become intricately intertwined across space and time in The Beast, the saga of a woman and a man linked by fate and connected across eras. Loosely inspired by Henry James’ 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” French auteur Bertrand Bonello’s latest is a decidedly unique sci-fi saga, and while its assortment of recurring images, conversations, scenes, and dynamics intermittently borders on the exhausting, it plays as an intriguing meditation on desire, dreams, and the things that make us who we are—and without which we’re lost.
“There must be beautiful things in this chaos,” says Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) in The Beast. At that juncture, it’s 2014. However, following a prologue in which Gabrielle fends off an invisible adversary on a green-screen movie set, Bonello’s film (making its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival) initially situates itself in 1910, where Gabrielle is the pianist wife of well-to-do dollmaker Georges (Martin Scali). At a get-together at an opulent mansion, Bonello’s camera trails her—and occasionally assumes her POV—with silky elegance as she wends her way through patrons to an art exhibition room, where she encounters aristocratic Louis (George MacKay). As it turns out, they already met years earlier, when Gabrielle confessed her deepest, darkest secret to Louis: She’s gripped by a consuming fear that doom awaits her in the form of “a rare and terrible thing” that will “obliterate her.” This calamity is the figurative title creature and Louis, enchanted by the lovely musician, pledges to eternally protect her from it.
Thus, an illicit affair is initiated, albeit slowly, as The Beast takes its time with Gabrielle and Louis’ early twentieth-century amour. Co-written with Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit, Bonello’s film abruptly jumps to 2044 to find an identical Gabrielle (Seydoux) being interviewed by an unseen artificial intelligence. Gabrielle wants a new job that will utilize her distinctly human characteristics, but in this distant future, mankind’s emotions have resulted in a catastrophic war from which society only recovered thanks to cool, rational A.I. So greatly does Earth’s computerized overlord value calm detachment that it now encourages individuals to undergo a DNA “purification” process that cleanses them of yesterday, today and tomorrow’s hang-ups, traumas and longings, including those experienced in past lives. Gabrielle reluctantly agrees to undergo this techno-neutering, yet upon entering the inky bath where it takes place (courtesy of a robotic arm and syringe), she hesitates, thereby allowing her to relive her former 1910 and 2014 incarnations.
Shifting aspect ratios and perspectives, Bonello unpredictably fragments his film and litters it with motifs—including, humorously, a hot spot dubbed “Fractal.” Shots of caressing hands and teary eyes are legion, the former to impart a tactile sense of connection and the latter to suggest Gabrielle’s inherently sensitive soulfulness. Additional symbols abound, from neutral-faced dolls and pigeons that portend misfortune (when they’re inside) to glittering wing-shaped brooches, uninhibited nightclubs, prescient psychics ,and Barbra Streisand’s A Star is Born hit “Evergreen.” These signifiers all speak to Bonello’s thematic preoccupations, and they all reoccur, mutate, and spiral about (literally, with regards to a painting of a Buddhist sand mandala spied in a 2014 home) in intriguing ways, even if there comes a point when their sheer repetitiveness begins to seem like overkill.
Central to The Beast is Gabrielle’s terror over a disaster that she can’t properly define but is certain is on the horizon. If Seydoux’s protagonist is incapable of identifying or articulating the source of her dread, she nonetheless routinely expresses (via words and actions) a wish to not be alone and, also, to not accept a comfortably indifferent life. She’s a woman who, no matter the decade, is possessed by an innate hunger for more, and through her yearning, Bonello grounds his film in universal ideas about loneliness, disaffection and companionship. At the same time, though, he roots his chronologically fragmented material in the here-and-now, be it with references to an American civil war (a dig at our present bifurcated domestic reality) or a 2014 storyline that skewers modern moviemaking and online masculine resentment and rage.
In that segment, Gabrielle is a struggling actress who, now 30 years old, is worried that she’s already past her prime. While housesitting at a wealthy Hollywood abode, she becomes the target of Louis, an avowed incel who makes videos about his virginity and the resultant anger it’s bred in him against women. Whereas its 1910 sequences are more overtly romantic and its 2044 passages are coolly unnerving and despondent, The Beast’s 2014 thread proves to be its most bleakly amusing and suspenseful, and features perhaps the finest of Seydoux and MacKay’s three lead performances. Bonello further ups the formal ante during this plot’s climax, freezing, rewinding and fast-forwarding the action in helter-skelter fashion to amplify the proceedings’ schizo malleability. At such WTF moments, the film feels most unpredictable and alive, its echoes reverberating ominously.
The Beast ponders whether love and desire are the agents of our destruction or, conversely, our salvation, and Bonello is shrewd enough to complicate that question by providing sometimes contradictory answers. Affairs of the heart lead to tragedy but so too does rejecting intimacy, sentiment and unions. What’s left, then, are Seydoux and MacKay’s stirring evocations of Gabrielle and Louis’ multifaceted passion, which plays out in different—and yet eerily similar—form depending on the historical age. MacKay convincingly segues between charming, remote and psychotic as Louis, and Seydoux is even more charismatic as Gabrielle, a loner who struggles with the pressure to conform to societal norms, strives for happiness even in the face of (real and imagined) danger, and refuses—actively and instinctively—to reduce herself. Seydoux’s open face is the stuff that movie cameras were made for, and in the director’s innumerable zooms into close-up, she conveys Gabrielle’s ardent, irrepressible spirit.
Twisting the before and after into knots, The Beast is a sci-fi parable of alarmingly amorphous dread. Its mood may be weakened by narrative monotony but, by and large, it wields its David Lynch-ian surrealism to unique ends, as well as finds a way to end on a despairing note that would be right at home on The Twilight Zone.
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