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'The Beast' jumps from 1910, to 2014, to 2044, tracking fear through the ages

Justin Chang

Gabrielle and Louis (Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) meet in 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles and again in 2044 in The Beast . Carole Bethuel/Kinology hide caption

Gabrielle and Louis (Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) meet in 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles and again in 2044 in The Beast .

There's no easy way to sum up the work of the brilliant and maddening French writer-director Bertrand Bonello. In recent years, he's made a zombie thriller rooted in Haitian voodoo lore and an unconventional biopic of Yves Saint-Laurent. His most controversial title, Nocturama , is a hangout movie about a group of French youth carrying out terrorist attacks around Paris. Bonello's films have a unique way of blurring the intellectual and the aesthetic: Their gorgeous surfaces are often loaded with troubling and provocative ideas.

His latest movie is called The Beast , and it's one of the best and least classifiable things he's ever done. It's a wildly original adaptation of the 1903 Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle , about a man who dwells in a constant state of fear.

James' story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of being too cautious, of not embracing life and love to the fullest. Bonello takes this premise and spins it in several unexpected directions. First, he recasts the hesitant protagonist as a woman, named Gabrielle, played by the wonderful Léa Seydoux. Then he positions her in three different stories, set in three time frames, and suffused with elements of horror, mystery and science fiction. It's easier to follow than it sounds: Even when it's not entirely clear where or when we are, Bonello's filmmaking is so hypnotic, and Seydoux's performance so subtly mesmerizing, that you can't help getting caught up in the flow.

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The first story is the one that most closely resembles the novella. It's 1910, and Gabrielle is a renowned pianist who has a run-in at a Paris salon with a gentleman named Louis, played by the English actor George MacKay. In a setup that evokes the confounding 1961 classic Last Year at Marienbad , Gabrielle and Louis seem to vaguely recall having met before. There's a clear attraction between them, but Gabrielle, who's married, resists pursuing it. Her restraint will cost her in a climax that coincides with a real-life Parisian catastrophe, the Great Flood of 1910.

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The second story takes place in Los Angeles in 2014, and has some of the eerie menace of David Lynch 's masterpiece Mulholland Dr. Gabrielle is now an aspiring model and actor who's been housesitting for a wealthy Angeleno. Rattled by a violent earthquake one morning, she steps outside and runs into Louis, who's now a deeply disturbed incel who's been posting misogynist video rants online.

MacKay is utterly terrifying as this Louis, who's modeled on a man who killed six people in 2014 in Isla Vista, Calif. What makes this second segment so chilling is that, unlike in the novella, the protagonist's fear is not unfounded. The beast stalking Gabrielle is all too real.

The third story is the most elusive and intriguing. It's set in 2044, when the world is run by AI. Gabrielle plays a human who, to join the work force, must undergo a process that will rid her of her emotions. This segment, with its shades of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , explains the framework of the entire movie: It turns out that the 1910 and 2014 sections are remnants of Gabrielle's past lives, now being purged from her subconscious.

Bonello doesn't tell the stories one at a time; he jumps around and among them. He's tracking the sources of human alienation and anxiety through the ages, asking why, in every era, we find ways to disengage from life and the people around us. The movie is especially insightful about how technology evolves. Each chapter features an artificial human companion of sorts: a line of baby dolls in 1910, a talking doll in 2014, a robot friend in 2044. Along the way, Bonello also asks questions about the future of movies, a medium so overrun with CGI that it's become harder to tell what's real from what isn't.

As grim as The Beast sounds, it isn't entirely pessimistic about the state of the world. I left the movie feeling disturbed but also enthralled, and strangely reassured by Seydoux's presence in all three stories. The futuristic Gabrielle may have to divest herself of her feelings, but Seydoux's emotions are always within reach. The more unreal her surroundings become, the more hauntingly human her performance feels.

'The Beast' Review: Léa Seydoux Astounds in Science Fiction Epic

Bertrand Bonello's audacious and increasingly terrifying melodrama is his best film yet.

The Big Picture

• The Beast is a massive and menacing sci-fi film with a terrifying finale.
• Léa Seydoux brilliantly captures underlying fear and hope in every moment.
• The unique structure and disquieting dread make it a formidable work of cinema.

This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.

Though it refers to something very different in the context of its story, The Beast is a fitting title for writer-director Bertrand Bonello ’s latest film as it begins to convey the massive scope of the canvas he is painting on. A monumental and menacing science fiction journey through time, it's an unwieldy work that still manages to delicately wind its way around you before crushing the air from your lungs . The terror of the finale alone will forever etch itself in your memory. It is a long road, but it all connects in a way that becomes absolutely flooring. Spanning decades of time that can pass in the blink of an eye, it takes us through separate moments of the multiple lives of a woman who feels disaster bearing down on her in each of them. Played by the always magnificent Léa Seydoux of the outstanding recent films One Fine Morning and Crimes of the Future , which almost feel like they are coalescing here, we see her trying desperately to avert a looming destruction that she does not yet even fully understand. It all comes viscerally alive, in an uncanny visual and emotional sense, as if we are watching the fragments of a memory being played back long after they have faded.

The Beast (2024)

In a near future artificial intelligence is in control of everyone's lives and human emotions are perceived as a threat.

What Is 'The Beast' About?

Only loosely based on Henry James ’ 1903 novella, “The Beast in the Jungle,” the opening of the film places us in a desolate green screen environment where Seydoux’s character is acting out a horrifying scene. It is eerie to see her going through the motions and more than a bit biting as Bonello seems to be having a go at the emptiness of modern filmmaking that robs scenes of their physicality . At the moment when danger rears its unseen head, we witness the first of many warpings of the screen and then the title card. It is a bold beginning that raises many questions the film won’t answer for quite a while as we then settle into 1904 France where we see Seydoux’s Gabrielle. As she wanders through a luxurious party, she comes across Louis ( George MacKay ) as if by chance. And yet, the two seem drawn to each other. It is as if they were both a distant memory in the other’s life that they are only just now recalling. This is only the start of a sweeping and sinister experience that leaves nothing on the table .

Much of this is seen in the hauntingly near future where artificial intelligence has taken over our world. We meet up with Gabrielle once more who is disillusioned with her draining job and wants to do something more fulfilling with her life. To do so, she must undergo a procedure that will purge her of all her emotions as that is considered to be a danger in this future. These feelings will then take her back to what seem to be past lives playing out both in 1904 and in 2014 Los Angeles which was where we first met her in the green screen sequence. As she then sees these memories playing out before her just as she is at risk of losing them, it initially feels like the classic Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been crossed with Amy Seimetz ’s spectacular She Dies Tomorrow . Only here, the film dials up the existential dread that just keeps getting louder and louder until it reaches a fever pitch .

This brief encapsulation leaves out many of the details and textures of the film as the past continually echoes into the present. The technology is different, with Gabrielle and all the inhabitants of this future world having to use devices to breathe outside in an echo of the recent series Extrapolations , though we keep hearing things that remind us of how familiar everything is. Love, loneliness, death, life, joy, and misery are all swirling around every frame. Even when it makes a rather jarring pivot to see how Louis has become a pathetic incel in the Los Angeles timeline, this all ends up making sense as you reflect on it. Indeed, the film itself even rewinds and plays back key moments as if it is trying to understand how someone so kind in one time could become monstrous in another. It is all made chilling as we see his cruelty begin to boil over with MacKay absolutely disappearing into the character. However, this is Seydoux’s moment to shine and shine she does once more in an increasingly bleak film .

Léa Seydoux Is Brilliant in 'The Beast'

Across each twist in time and place that can rush together without warning, the grounding force to it all is Seydoux . From the recurring interviews Gabrielle must undergo trying to get her new job in the future to the similar discontentment she feels in the past, we feel every moment of it. There is an unspoken yet still no less painful underlying connection between all of these moments that she embodies perfectly. No matter what Gabrielle does, she can feel the world closing in around her and something disastrous coming. There is nothing that can be done to push this away from her mind. Even friendly conversations she shares in the future with an unexpected companion, played by the great Guslagie Malanda of the stunning Saint Omer , offer only small respites. Not only is salvation in short supply, but there is the potential for Gabrielle to be destroyed before even realizing what it was her short lives could be.

As all of its vast scenes collapse in on each other, with each cut carrying its own disquieting dread, The Beast proves to be among the most formidable films you'll be lucky enough to see in a lifetime. When it comes together in one of the most striking conclusions of the year, the final echoes you hear may just continue to ring out through time once more .

The Beast is a monumental and menacing sci-fi film with an astounding performance by Léa Seydoux that you won't soon forget.

• Writer-director Bertrand Bonello has made what is his best film yet, making everything come viscerally alive.
• Léa Seydoux is brilliant once more, ensuring we feel every moment even as the film itself is quite unwieldy.
• The ending providing a spectacular and striking conclusion that is certain to be among the most formidable you see for some time.

The Beast comes to theaters in the U.S. starting April 5. Click below for showtimes near you.

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The beast review: the world is always ending in this sweeping sci-fi romance.

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• The Beast examines past lives' influence on the present, focusing on a central pair's history.
• The film mixes genres excitingly, with horror constantly looming in each story.
• The fear depicted in The Beast reflects contemporary anxieties, emphasizing the importance of feeling over forgetting.

The Beast is an apt title for a film that often feels untamable. A centuries-spanning romantic odyssey that is equal parts strange sci-fi and high melodrama, Bertrand Bonello's film is unclassifiable, wild, and refreshing. The French director examines how the past never stays in the past and how the baggage we attempt to rid ourselves of from moment to moment, or even from life to life, will inevitably rear its oft-ugly head.

The year is 2044: artificial intelligence controls all facets of a stoic society as humans routinely “erase” their feelings. Hoping to eliminate pain caused by their past-life romances, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) continually falls in love with different incarnations of Louis (George MacKay).

• Though spanning centuries, The Beast brings modern fears into the story
• Léa Seydoux and George MacKay are excellent
• The Beast knows how to balance its sci-fi and romance
• The film lovingly highlights the importance of feelings and not forgetting

The Beast Moves Through Time To Unveil The Past Lives Of Its Central Pair

How they influence the present is just as important.

In 2044, Gabrielle ( Léa Seydoux ) is trying to rid herself of that baggage through a procedure that purifies a person's DNA, purging the patient of leftover emotions from their past lives. This procedure will rid her of these past traumas that cause Gabrielle to feel a lingering sense of doom in the present day. What that doom entails remains a mystery, but she's not the only one hoping to temper feelings of disquiet.

Gabrielle encounters Louis (George MacKay) while prepping for the procedures, and she is drawn to the man with an air of familiarity about him. When she finally dives into her past lives, we see her encounter different versions of Louis that change the course of her various lives. First, the pair meet in Belle-Époque-era Paris. In another life, Louis is an incel stalking Gabrielle as she house-sits a Los Angeles mansion while working as an actress.

The Beast Plays With Genre In Increasingly Exciting Ways

But the inevitability of horror lies around every corner.

In all of these lives, Gabrielle is near fatalistic in her conviction that some bad thing will befall her. The Beast 's real terror, though, comes from actualizing this feeling in its various tales. Whispers of Paris flooding follow Gabrielle and Louis in the early 20th century. Misogyny and violence hover over Gabrielle's life in 2014 Los Angeles. The threat of control follows her everywhere in 2044. The film's score and sound design are unsettling as they mimic or even impact what's happening onscreen.

All of these disparate elements feel like they shouldn't work together, but it's their discordant qualities that allow The Beast to coalesce into a symphony of anxiety.

Tight string arrangements follow Gabrielle as she's stalked through the Los Angeles mansion. Sweeping orchestral music accompanies Louis and Gabrielle's outings in Paris and deep synths serve as a backdrop for the film's minimalist future. All of these disparate elements feel like they shouldn't work together, but it's their discordant qualities that allow The Beast to coalesce into a symphony of anxiety.

In The Beast, The Apocalypse Is A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The end is just the beginning.

The world is always ending in The Beast, and it's easy to see our own world reflected in the ones portrayed by Bonello. Seydoux's dialed-in performance — detached but all too aware — ensures that we are never too comfortable. Gabrielle's anxieties are much like our own — sea levels rising, political unrest, the erosion of the truth and empathy. Ironic detachment is the mode of our times, but when the irony disappears and all that remains is indifference, the world starts to feel a lot like the future in The Beast .

Even the film itself begins with detachment personified. In 2014, Gabrielle films a scene for what appears to be a horror movie, but in place of the empty house and horrifying monster, the floor and background are green screen. The director asks if she can be afraid of something that isn't really there. Gabrielle says she can. The fear we create in our heads is just as real as the fear created by a world in disarray. Those fears can manifest in people, in world-ending events, or in ideologies.

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By the end, The Beast knows that this fear — Gabrielle's and our own — is not something that can be purged. It is this fear that allows Gabrielle to be sincere, to search for meaning in a world where it is being sucked out of the air. In 2044, Artificial Intelligence rules the world after an unspecified catastrophe.

This catastrophe isn't the one Gabrielle is afraid of, but it is one that perhaps influenced her fear of the future. Our minds are always searching for something to be afraid of. Sometimes we need that fear. Bonello posits that, even in fear, feeling is more important than forgetting, and every little death is a door to another future.

The Beast opens in select theaters on Friday, April 5, expanding to more theaters on April 12.

• The Beast (2024)

Review: Idris Elba, meet lion. The new thriller ‘Beast’ doesn’t beat around the bush

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Lions and poachers and snares, oh my! In the satisfyingly grisly survival thriller “Beast,” Idris Elba plays a grieving widower who drags his two teenage daughters to a South African game reserve, embarking on an emotional journey that devolves into a nightmarish tussle with Mother Nature. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun; this one has two girls and several rifles, though one of them only fires none-too-effective tranquilizer darts. The movie’s real weapon is a very large, very angry, skillfully computer-generated king of the jungle that turns out to have a major bone to pick (or crush) with the human race.

The animus is more than justified, given the ruinous state of the world in general and the ruthless poachers who’ve hunted these lions in particular. A few of those poachers come to a deservedly nasty end in the prologue, a tense nighttime set piece that establishes the human-versus-nature stakes and, no less important, a consistent, coherent visual scheme. Most of the mayhem in “Beast” is staged in lengthy, serpentine tracking shots that keep pace with the characters as they try to detect, evade and flee from a predator that might always be just a few lunges away. As his camera prowls the rugged terrain in precisely choreographed movements, director Baltasar Kormákur (working with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot) achieves a physical groundedness that makes even a digitally engineered predator seem palpably real.

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That groundedness also anchors the predictably hokey if refreshingly straightforward narrative preliminaries laid out in Ryan Engle’s screenplay (based on a story by Jaime Primak Sullivan). Nate Samuels (Elba) is a doctor, which you can bet is going to come in handy. He and his daughters — moody, photography-loving Mare (Iyana Halley) and spunky Norah (Leah Jeffries) — are visiting South Africa, the homeland of their recently deceased wife and mother. (The movie was shot on location in the country’s Northern Cape province.) They’re on a healing journey, or at least that’s the idea; family friction keeps intruding, much of it rooted in Nate’s specific failures as a husband and father.

Helping to relieve the mood is Nate’s longtime friend Martin (the invaluable Sharlto Copley, from “District 9” ). A combination game warden and wildlife whisperer, Martin is on hand to play safari guide and murmur ominous warnings about “the law of the jungle,” even as he demonstrates firsthand how harmless and cuddly the local lion prides are. You can’t blame them for the graphically mauled human corpses that suddenly turn up in a nearby village. That would be the handiwork of a much bigger, meaner lion that soon roars into the frame, trapping the group deep in the South African bush with only a stalled jeep for shelter. There’s a peculiarly monstrous, almost mutant quality to this dark-maned beast, who looks a bit like Aslan of the Dead , or perhaps Scar from “The Lion King” after a cocktail of steroids and bath salts.

That sounds ridiculous, but it turns out to be just the right amount of ridiculous for this shrewd, stripped-down late-summer diversion. Kormákur has been working his way toward this B-movie sweet spot for a while. Over a career that’s zigzagged between his native Iceland and Hollywood, he’s become a reliable disaster artist, capsizing a boat in “The Deep,” stranding two lovers at sea in “Adrift” and following mountain climbers on a snowy death march in “Everest.” The human body in extremis is his comfort zone, and here, with pouncing paws, snapping jaws and discreetly blood-gushing wounds, he sustains — and, crucially, modulates — the threat of grievous bodily harm.

It helps that the central foursome, especially Halley and Jeffries, are as likable as they are, which helps mitigate and even sell the absurdity of those moments that will have you screaming “Stay in the car, you idiot!” and “Roll up the [your choice of expletive] window!” Elba, a reliably suave man of action, shrewdly downplays here as a bumbling dad who, brawny frame and medical expertise aside, is no physical match for Pridezilla. That remains true even as things hurtle toward an inevitable mano-a-mane climax, a ludicrous if enjoyable reminder that just because you’ve seen one killer CGI lion, it doesn’t mean you’ve seen them maul.

Rating: R, for violent content, bloody images and some language Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes Playing: Starts Aug. 19 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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The Beast review: a gonzo sci-fi movie with a touch of David Lynch

“The full galaxy-brain ambition of The Beast could not be anticipated.”

• Wildly ambitious
• Deeply unnerving
• Two strong performances
• Some awkward stretches

For Bertrand Bonello, movies are like rubber bands: They’re meant to be stretched as far as they’ll go. The Beast , the French writer-director’s latest, spans eras, continents, languages, and genres. It is, at minimum, three movies in one, with enough preoccupations for many more still. Bonello loves to collapse time and space. His rapturous House of Pleasures used anachronistic pop and a parting, divisive flash-forward to connect one century’s sex work to another’s, while his Zombi Child possessed a modern Parisian coming-of-age drama with the spirit of midcentury Haitian horror. Conceptually speaking, those were but preludes to the audacious pastiche he’s made this time. The full galaxy-brain ambition of The Beast could not be anticipated.

As it turns out, an inability to anticipate is what Bonello is driving at here, at least in part. Unease about a future that is unknown certainly haunts Gabrielle, his chronologically trifurcated heroine, played by French movie star and former Bond girl Léa Seydoux. “Can you get scared by something that’s not actually here?” a filmmaker asks her during an acting audition. Standing against a wall fully draped in green screen, he’s talking about the ability to convincingly react to nothing — an all-too-necessary skillset for performers of the 21st century. For Gabrielle, this is not a big ask. She has, after all, spent multiple lifetimes gripped by fear of something that’s not actually there. That’s the beast of the title, though psychologists know it by a different name.

The movie opens on a soundstage, a backdrop of green, in what turns out to be a flashback of sorts. The present tense of The Beast is the future — specifically, a serenely dystopian 2044 controlled by AI and defined by a willful movement toward dimming emotion. Bonello’s conception of this bleak world is suggestively sparse: bare rooms shrouded in darkness, eerily depopulated streets, fashion and interior design not easily identified by decade. Less can be more when you’re trying to envision tomorrow on a budget; as a bonus, the black-box minimalism and lack of technological detail guarantee that The Beast won’t look hopelessly outdated six months from now.

Guided by a disembodied computer overlord voiced by fellow filmmaker Xavier Dolan — an element that recalls Alphaville , a gold standard for resourcefully making now feel like later — Gabrielle submits to “purification.” This faintly Lacuna Inc-like therapy allows patients to access memories of past lives to scrub their very DNA of bad feelings. Through the process, Gabrielle discovers her secret connection to a handsome stranger she’s just met, Louis ( 1917 ’s George MacKay, in a part originally intended for Bonello’s late St. Laurent star Gaspard Ulliel). It turns out the two really met in another lifetime, in the France of 1910, when she was a married musician and he a dashing suitor. Their tentative courtship, creeping around the edges of indiscretion, allows Bonello to do his own version of Edith Wharton — a miniature costume drama elegantly shot on 35mm.

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The dialogue during these terrific scenes alternates between French and English, sometimes almost as a means of inflection, reflecting subtle shifts in the seductive charge between the two. Some of it is borrowed from the unlikely source material: the 1903 Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle , about a man caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy, so blinded by his certainty that misfortune awaits him that he fails to really live (which is, of course, the misfortune he fears). To say that this is a loose adaptation would be to put it lightly; more than just flipping the gender of the afflicted character, Bonello expands the story outward into a curious science fiction triptych. But its tragedy remains visible through the metaphysical layers. Much of it rests on Seydoux, the rare modern movie star with a timeless glamour, equally at home in an opera house of the early 1900s and a bumping nightclub of the debased 2010s.

Speaking of which, The Beast eventually leaps into the Los Angeles of 2014, when Gabrielle is now an aspiring actress. Louis, meanwhile, has been reborn as an embittered virgin; his resentment is like an echo of the rejection he experienced a century earlier across the ocean. Bonello models this new version of the character on Elliot Rodger, the mass shooter who killed six people during a rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara. MacKay, delivering a close imitation of that real-life killer’s misogynistic YouTube musings, chillingly taps into the entitlement and self-pity of incel martyrdom. What’s spooky-good about the performance is how you can still see glimmers of the romantic MacKay plays in the turn-of-the-century scenes. He creates a continuity of character across two very different specimens of blue-balls bachelorhood.

Marked by a few stilted bit performances and a hypnotically repetitive rhythm, this near-contemporary stretch of the movie — a trance stalker 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 modern life that the scenes closest to “present day” are the least convincing? Bonello’s barely period-piece vision of a Hollywood of casting calls, callous nightlife, and video-call psychics suggests a sentence translated from English to French and then back again. While so much fiction paints the early 20th century as an age of repression, Bonello intriguingly upends convention by depicting the world of the past as more emotionally open than the present.

Just as motifs repeat across the film’s timelines — dolls, pigeons, and fortune tellers make multiple appearances — there’s a déjà vu quality to much of The Beast itself. Befitting its laptop-age flourishes, it sometimes suggests a gonzo supercut, as if Bonello were filtering past-lives reveries of the past like Cloud Atlas , The Fountain , and 2046 through the velvet dread of David Lynch . (The ending, when a waltz in a red room shatters into screaming distress, is deeply Twin Peaks- coded.) All the same, Bonello’s way with unnerving atmosphere is his own. The movie’s climax, a fated reunion of estranged kindred spirits that plays out in a vulnerable glass house on the edge of showbiz, is like a shuddering psychic aftershock of the director’s masterpiece, Nocturama . Here, as in that terrorists-in-Paris provocation, Bonello warps time, turning the suspenseful final scenes into a buffering, skipping glitch in the feed.

“It’s very inventive, but it’s hard to find the emotion in it,” someone says of a piece of music early on. For some, that may be true of The Beast , too: It’s easier to admire the structural gambit of the film   — to marvel at the scope of its genre-blending, century-jumping architecture — than to be drawn into its melodrama. But maybe 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 destined to keep passing each other like ships in the night? For all Gabrielle’s odyssey of therapeutic remembrance recalls a library of reincarnation romances, Bonello’s real subject isn’t love but the ways we psychologically wall ourselves off from it. Passion fades with time. It’s our defense mechanisms and the anxieties undergirding them that are truly built to last.

The Beast opens in select theaters Friday, April 5. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his  Authory page .

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A father and his two teenage daughters find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the Savanna has but one apex predator. A father and his two teenage daughters find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the Savanna has but one apex predator. A father and his two teenage daughters find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the Savanna has but one apex predator.

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• Trivia On why he did the movie, Idris Elba stated: "I come from an era where these sort of films were the norm, like high-anxiety, 'Run, chase, run, chase, look out, look behind you!' This was an opportunity for me to make a film like that. I've done thrillers before, but this was the first time it involved this cat-and-mouse aspect to it. I was really intrigued by the family dynamic, the daughters, the nature of grief, this doctor who's essentially someone that's composed and tries not to panic, found himself doing just that," Elba tells Complex about the survival thriller directed by Baltasar Kormákur. "I just love the script. I love Baltasar, the director. I wanted to work with him. He's made some really incredible survivor movies, and I just wanted to get his take on what this might be like."
• Goofs When Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) is in the lake looking for keys, he's wading almost shoulder-deep in the water. In the next shot when he is out of the water, his shirt is completely dry.

Martin Battles : Come On You Bastard

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Martin Battles : I'm Sorry Boy

• Crazy credits After credits we here the sounds of the Savannah and lions roaring when the title comes up several slash marks appear on it followed by a lion growling
• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Beast (2022)
• Soundtracks Black Man's Cry Written & Performed by Fela Kuti (as Fela Anikulapo Kuti) Courtesy of Knitting Factory Records/Partisan Records

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• August 19, 2022 (United States)
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• $36,000,000 (estimated)
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• Aug 21, 2022
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• Runtime 1 hour 33 minutes
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‘Beast’ Review: An Angry Lion, but More Bore Than Roar

In this action dud, Idris Elba plays a grieving father who takes his kids on a family trip to South Africa, where they meet one very big C.G.I. animal.

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By Manohla Dargis

Sometime soon, “Beast” will hit the great streaming graveyard. Say a prayer and move on. By that point, you will have heard that it’s a dud. And while you may be tempted to watch it anyway — it does star Idris Elba — hoping that it’s tasty enough to fire up a bowl, don’t do it. It has a few scattered laughs, some apparently intentional. But this is thin, unimaginative hack work, and it lacks the deranged seriousness and commitment that distinguishes a pleasurable misfire from bland dreck like this. It is, I am sorry to say, no “ Gods of Egypt .”

There’s a story, sure. Elba plays Nate, a doctor who takes his daughters, Norah and Meredith (Leah Jeffries and Iyana Halley), on one of those movieland journeys that turn into an extended, predictably dreary family therapy session. His estranged wife has recently died, and he and the girls are in mourning. So, they have flown to Mom’s home country, South Africa, where they stay with an old friend, Martin (Sharlto Copley). They’re there for restorative healing or something, though given all the dumb, dangerous choices Nate makes, it’s hard to think that his kids’ well-being is uppermost in his mind.

The movie is relatively short, as far as contemporary Hollywood action flicks go, and soon Nate and company are driving and then screaming and running through the scenery without cell service, being chased by a very big, very angry lion. The director Baltasar Kormakur keeps the camera moving and circling, but there’s nothing he can do to animate the story (the script is by Ryan Engle), particularly after the characters crash, becoming stranded in Martin’s truck. In between attacks and roars and screams, blood and feelings flow, and water runs low — the usual. Elba looks and sounds exceedingly bored, and you know how he feels.

One of the best things about contemporary digital wizardry is that wild animals no longer need to be subjected to human cruelty and nonsense in the name of cinema. There are real animals throughout “Beast,” but the lion that chases Nate et al. is obviously a computer creation. It has its reasons for attacking people, as our environmental catastrophe makes clear. Yet while the story repeatedly references poaching, it isn’t really interested in animals, and its truer interests are telegraphed by a character’s “Jurassic Park” T-shirt. I mean, it would be nice if animals were taking their revenge — this movie alone should enrage them.

Beast Rated R for gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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‘The Beast’ Review: Léa Seydoux and George MacKay Are Star-Crossed Lovers in Bertrand Bonello’s Magnificent Sci-Fi Epic

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s Note: This review originally published during the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Sideshow and Janus Films will release “ The Beast ” in U.S. theaters on April 5, 2024.

Split into three lightly intercut parts that trace the connection between two star-crossed souls (embodied by Léa Seydoux and George MacKay ) from 1910 to 2044, Bonello’s latest and most accessible movie begins by literalizing the same basic premise that has undergirded previous work like “House of Tolerance” and “Zombi Child”: The past is always present (a dialectic explored here with the help of a machine that encourages people to purify their DNA by purging themselves of any emotion left over from their past lives).  Related Stories ‘The Surfer’ Review: Nicolas Cage Goes Mad in This Hallucinatory Australian Thriller Dabney Coleman, Emmy-Winning Character Actor Who Became One of Hollywood’s Go-To Villains, Dead at 92

The genre elements at play here allow Bonello to take for granted what his earlier films had to earn, and “The Beast” makes the most of that head start by knotting its overlapping temporalities into a story that’s suspended between the baggage we have from yesterday and the anxiety we have for tomorrow. As its title might imply, “The Beast” is a fairy tale of sorts — one whose moral instructs us to live in the moment, lest we not live at all.

But the film’s true power stems from and speaks to our specifically present condition as people beset on all sides by the fears of our own imagination. By the trauma of something that already happened, or the terror of something that might. In the grand tradition of the dystopian stories that inspired it, “The Beast” is a cautionary spectacle about what happens to a world in which people become so afraid of rejection that they eliminate any possibility of love; a world that so thoroughly inures itself to the threat of oblivion that everyone living in it might as well be dead already.

From there, “The Beast” whisks us back in time to turn-of-the-century Paris for its first proper segment, in which a married woman named Gabrielle (Seydoux) falls in love with a man named Louis (MacKay), who owns a factory that manufactures dolls made out of celluloid. She tells him that she’s due to befall some awful tragedy in the future, and he swears to protect Gabrielle from “the beast” that walks beside her. 

More than 100 years later, after AI has averted nuclear armageddon and inflated the unemployment rate up to 67%, a reincarnated Gabrielle will have to cleanse her mind in order to land one of the few jobs still available (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is another unavoidable reference point). That process, facilitated by a pool of black goo and supervised by a humanoid doll played by “Saint Omer” standout Guslagie Malanda, will involve reliving the crisis she predicted to Louis, and then meeting him again in 2014 (the longest and most Bonello-like section of the movie), when she was an aspiring French actress in Hollywood and he was — deep breath — incel mass-murderer Elliot Rodger. 

Which isn’t to suggest the other sections don’t have their own parts to play. Bonello fans might find the 1910 plot — characteristically airless though it is — as shocking for its conservatism as the 2014 one is for its extremity. But if this chapter of “The Beast” could be confused for a Merchant-Ivory film at a distance, the looming threat of Gabrielle’s crisis adds an ineffable uneasiness to every scene. Beautifully rendered in what establishes itself as Bonello’s most lavish production to date, the Paris floods don’t seem to fulfill Gabrielle’s prophecy at first, but she lacks the foresight to understand the film’s ongoing relationship between personal and national catastrophes, or the role that catastrophes of any kind will come to play in a story that imagines the end of catastrophes to be the most dire outcome of all.  

In 2014, that expresses itself through the eyes of an actress whose job requires her to risk rejection, and whose curiosity invites her to engage with the sociopath who sees her as a living symbol of everything he can’t have. Bonello takes a palpable degree of pleasure in the hyper-Lynchian affect of the LA scenes, which feel half-lodged in “Mulholland Drive” even as they force our attention towards psychics, dolls, and the various other motifs that exist to put the different parts of “The Beast” in conversation with each other (as opposed to with other movies). 

In 2044, Gabrielle’s desire to feel is presented as a quiet rebellion against a lo-fi dystopia where everyone dresses in drab colors and only knows how to have simulated fun. At all times, that desire proves isolating, and “The Beast” is never more affecting than when it imagines the profound loneliness of being a vulnerable person in a world that’s scared of its own shadow.

Bonello, whose films are often more interested in negotiating the semiotics of emotion than provoking it, might seem like a strange messenger for a story so nakedly focused on the value of raw feeling. By the same token, a filmmaker who continues to be fascinated by the interplay between past and present might seem like a strange messenger for a story that so urgently tries to impart that now is all we have.

But “The Beast” is so affecting because it never deludes itself into thinking the past doesn’t matter ; Bonello couldn’t possibly convince us of that at this point. On the contrary, “The Beast” stretches across time and space to rescue the beauty from old traumas and unrealized anxieties before it’s too late — to make our lives more expansive by confronting the very things that scare us into shrinking them down, and sing of all that’s “Evergreen.” And, in its dying seconds, the film stands by the courage of its convictions by forcing us to feel something, too. Don’t be afraid to admit it. 

“The Beast” premiered in Competition at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

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‘the beast’ review: lea seydoux and george mackay in bertrand bonello’s creepy, conceptual time-tripping saga.

The French director adapts a Henry James novella, which he transforms into a romantic thriller set during three different epochs.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the name of the Philip K. Dick novel that Ridley Scott famously adapted into Blade Runner . Wading into similar dystopian sci-fi waters, Bertrand Bonello’s latest feature, The Beast ( La Bête ), tosses together so many ideas, time periods and genres, its source material could have been called: Do French Girls Dream of Androids While Trying to Escape from Incels in L.A. After the 1910 Paris Flood?

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Set simultaneously in 2044, 2014 and in the belle-époque Paris of 1910, when the Seine overflowed and plunged parts of the city underwater, The Beast is at once an anxiety-ridden romantic thriller and a conceptual cri de coeur about the possible end of humanity. It features incredibly lifelike robots, exposed green screens, freaky ceramic dolls, and scenes of Seydoux doing futuristic hot yoga and dancing to trap while high on molly.

What it doesn’t always have is dramatic conflict, losing its staying power in a story that takes so many unexpected turns, it can feel as if Bonello is grasping at theoretical straws rather than weaving together a strong narrative. In that sense, The Beast is closest to his 2022 COVID-inspired cinematic essay, Coma , which also combined different genres and mediums — and which, like this film, will play best to Bonello’s small but loyal fan base.

The framing device is the 2044 story, with Seydoux’s Gabrielle living in a post-apocalyptic Paris filled with empty streets and friendly androids, and where artificial intelligence has rendered human beings all but redundant. The powers-that-be suggest turning Gabrielle into a semi-robot as well, offering to modify her DNA and relieve her of any emotions, in a surgical procedure recalling the black slime bath in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin .

During the operation she hallucinates, dreams or remembers her past lives — starting in 1910, when she meets the shy but dashing Louis (MacKay) at a society ball. The two immediately have a connection, as if they’ve known each other for years, and soon they start meeting up in Paris, including a visit to the doll factory of Gabrielle’s husband.

That setting is strange indeed, with Bonello focusing on the factory’s new production methods that result in much more realistic toys — and the earliest prototypes of the state-of-the-art androids we see in 2044. The Beast is loaded with such connections — between past and present, old technologies and new ones, disasters that have already occurred and those to come — to the point that they become the main focus of the movie. It doesn’t necessarily make for thrilling cinema, but for those interested in following Bonello down a trippy rabbit hole where history keeps repeating itself, it can certainly be intriguing.

The comparison seems apt, especially when Bonello uses Roy Orbison’s very Lynchian song, “Evergreen,” as constant background music that plays on a karaoke channel Gabrielle never turns off. Other pop tracks pepper the movie, many of them heard in a futuristic disco specializing in retro soirées hopping from the 60s to the 70s to the 80s (a device used in another Gallic adaptation of the James story, simply called The Beast in the Jungle , currently out in French theaters). Like the plot itself, the music forms a feedback loop that keeps repeating with new variations, taking Gabrielle back to where she started.

Compared to recent performances , Seydoux feels more subdued here, almost robot-like at times — a comparison that Bonello deliberately makes when, at one moment, she freezes up for a few long seconds, as if she were a ceramic doll herself. The film in fact begins with the Palme d’Or winning actress playing a scene in a digital studio, pretending to escape a monster in front of a giant green screen. It immediately takes us out of the action and prepares us for what’s to come, which again seems to be the point: Bonello doesn’t want us to simply watch The Beast , but to pay attention to it.

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The Beast Reviews

Bold and bracingly provocative, this French romantic thriller layers Lynchian disorientation with some mind-bendingly complex sci-fi ideas while maintaining an unusually strong interior life.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 15, 2024

Bonello’s film is slow, it purposefully simmers, and as it does the cinematography masterfully utilizes repetition...The Beast isn’t just smart, it’s deftly crafted and lingers long after the credits end.

Full Review | Original Score: 84/100 | May 5, 2024

The universal themes of love and loneliness, coupled with Seydoux’s terrific performance make Bertrand Bonello's latest film a knockout. The visionary filmmaker fills you with intrigue and leaves you enthralled.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 1, 2024

Bonello’s genre-bending dystopian drama is not for everyone, it can be an endurance test for some but Léa Seydoux's magnetic performance keeps it engaging.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 26, 2024

"The Beast," a riff on a 1903 Henry James novella that has flashes of remarkable atmosphere but has trouble congealing into a cohesive whole.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Apr 26, 2024

Seydoux and McKay are directed for deliberately slow, methodical interaction. Bonello depicts past, present and future showcasing Seydoux’s versatility playing characters through different eras in a haunting, complicated, frightening history of romance.

Full Review | Apr 26, 2024

It’s a weird sweeping romance and sci-fi dystopia mix that taps into so many contemporary anxieties.

The Beast is a mesmerizing examination of our reluctance to open ourselves up to vulnerability and authentic experiences, as well as the barriers we establish out of self-preservation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 26, 2024

The more abstract and surreal that French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello's The Beast gets, the more beguiling and affecting it becomes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 25, 2024

The Beast is a lush affair, gorgeous to look at and nimble in the way themes echo across eras. It’s also an elegant reminder that an unruly heart is nothing to silence.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 25, 2024

[Bonello] comes nowhere near achieving anything as insightful in two and a half hours that James manages in 30 pages.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 25, 2024

It feels like he’s an artist in search of the perfect color combination. His restless nature makes all his films, including The Beast, worth seeking out and seeing on the biggest screen possible.

Full Review | Apr 24, 2024

... An ambitious and somewhat long film about a love like no other. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 22, 2024

A multi-genre/multi-century sci-fi philosophical whatchamacallit that wears out its welcome two-thirds of the way into a nearly two-and-a-half hour running time.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 22, 2024

What prevails in The Beasts is dehumanization and disagreement. In this, the film is faithful to the novel by Henry James. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 22, 2024

Bertrand Bonello uses science fiction and three distant timelines to build a story around the advance of individualism and the glorification of disaffection that impacts human bonds. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Apr 22, 2024

Sure, it becomes a bit creepy-crawly in the telling, but oh what a complete package of ideas, images and existential themes the extremist Bonello -- and bewitching Seydoux -- give us to ponder.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 20, 2024

Three periods, two great performances, and one of the year’s best, The Beast.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Apr 20, 2024

Outrageous, beautiful, horrific, tender, ugly, us at our most vulnerable, most open to and reliant upon AI. An artistic triumph that serves as a warning to the future us in a seductive, sensual black bath of enclosure and “purification”.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 19, 2024

If David Lynch had directed “Somewhere in Time,” it might have looked a bit like Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast.”

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 19, 2024

‘Emilia Perez’: Selena Gomez’s Trans Cartel Musical Is the Buzz of Cannes

‘IT’S A MUSICAL!’

“Emilia Perez” is a parade of big swings that shouldn’t work. Its Cannes Film Festival premiere proved it’s not for everyone, but those who give into it are loving the wild ride.

Esther Zuckerman

Shanna Besson

Nothing about Selena Gomez ’s new movie that premiered at Cannes should work.

Let's just review the plot. Stay with me here.

Emilia Perez is the mostly Spanish-language story of a lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), who is hired by a notorious cartel leader, Manitas, who has been on hormones for two years, to make secret arrangements for a gender confirmation surgery. Rita makes millions in the process. Cut to four years later: Manitas is now Emilia Perez. She is impossibly glamorous and has another task for Rita. Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) wants the lawyer, now a success in London, to retrieve her wife, Jessi (Gomez), and children from their hideaway in Switzerland and install them in a house in Mexico City, where Emilia will pose as her own kids’ aunt. Jessi assumes that Manitas is dead and has no idea who Emilia really is, but she wants to return to get back together with the sexy Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez), with whom she had an affair. Later, Emilia, atoning for her crimes as the ruthless Manitas, opens a foundation to locate the bodies of disappeared people.

This is all directed by a French filmmaker, the celebrated Jacques Audiard, who won the Palme d'Or in 2015 for Dheepan , about Tamil refugees. And, also, in the immortal words of Patti LuPone : It’s a musical.

Yes, amid all of this over-the-top telenovela plot there is singing and dancing, including one number in which Rita learns about surgery while doctors chant the name of procedures. The press screening at the Cannes Film Festival was met with applause, and audiences are (largely) eating it up. (The dissenters, however, are already loud.) In a Cannes year with already one truly wild movie — Francis Ford Coppola ’s Megalopolis — Emilia Perez is a close second in terms of sheer content. And yet despite how ridiculous it sounds on paper, Emilia Perez frequently does succeed in its goals, making it one of the boldest love-it-or-hate-it-movies of the festival.

Emilia Perez wins you over by being unabashedly sincere. It takes its mission in all of its various genres—musical, crime thriller, and soap opera—seriously thanks to the committed performances and Audiard's expressive direction. Nothing is treated as a gag despite the inherent zaniness of the performances. Ultimately, it's really earnest, above all else.

Saldaña is the anchor. The saga starts with Rita, who bemoans her job defending the rich and powerful in a song that spills out from the page of a document she’s writing onto the streets of a market, where she’s joined by a chorus. In her most triumphant number, she starts dancing her way through a gala, calling out all the evil politicians and businessmen in her wake, grinding in their faces. Meanwhile, we know Gomez can sing, but it’s thrilling to see her combine her acting chops with her pop star charisma, as the heartbroken, trapped Jessi bemoans her lot in life.

Still, the movie belongs to breakout Karla Sofía Gascón, a trans Spanish actress best known for her work in telenovelas. Unlike Saldaña and Gomez who belt, Gascón's songs are mostly plaintive ballads she delivers quietly. She portrays a woman torn between past and former selves, first seeking to feel like her true self and then hoping for love in return. A scene between Emilia and her daughter is one of the most touching.

Sure, there are elements of Emilia Perez that are unwieldy. To get everything in, some plots are shortchanged, mostly Jessi’s relationship with Gustavo, who is mostly silent, despite the presence of Ramírez. There is ultimate tenderness, but also some exploitation in the depiction of gender transition. It’s also a little eyebrow raising that few of the actors are from Mexico: Rita explains she is Dominican but moved there. Jessi says she has family in the U.S. The film is certainly a tourist’s view of the country. It was mostly shot in Paris.

But there's also an intoxicating quality to the experience of watching Emilia Perez , especially when it becomes a musical odyssey, and Audiard's camera swirls around the performers giving it their all to songs by French singer Camille, which are more pop opera than toe tapper.

The messages are ultimately simple: It's a movie all about finding yourself, but it comes to that conclusion in such a gonzo way you can't help but give in to it.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast  here .

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The tone and style of the Indian anti-terrorist action flick “Beast” varies wildly throughout, sometimes even within the same scene. This takes some getting used to, especially in a “ Die Hard ”-style siege thriller that’s also sometimes a musical-comedy about a handsome bachelor spy who also loves children and excels at dismembering and/or murdering terrorists.

There’s nothing unusual about this Masala-style of Bollywood pop filmmaking, where filmmakers pander to the back row with a schizoid combination of Vaudevillian quips and pop culture references, overdetermined romantic interludes, and nationalistic saber-rattling. This sort of anti-terrorist movie also sits comfortably next to a couple of other COVID-delayed Indian productions, especially from Bollywood (Hindi language) like the blockbuster “Sooryavanshi” and the superhero thriller “Attack—Part 1.”

“Beast,” a Kollywood (Tamil) star vehicle for Vijay, still feels different, if only for how vigorously its creators try to sell their lead as a 21st century renaissance man. Vijay (“Master”) can dance a little, drive a car through various glass surfaces, and also behead a terrorist and then chuck that guy’s disembodied head out of a tall window. To say nothing of the scene where Vijay puts on a set of roller blades and literally skates circles around a group of mask-wearing extremists.

Vijay’s all-things-for-everyone self-image is celebrated throughout, as in the chorus of one anthemic song that hails the chipmunk-cheeked hero as “leaner, meaner, stronger.” A concluding number also describes Vijay as a “multifaced tiger with a multifaceted avatar.” At this point in the movie, Vijay’s flying himself back from Pakistan in a borrowed military jet plane, having just independently massacred a terrorist encampment.

In “Beast,” Vijay plays Veera, a superhumanly resourceful former member of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) intelligence agency. Veera retired from RAW eleven years before the movie’s present day: in an introductory flashback, Veera unintentionally blows up a little girl with a rocket launcher. Look, there’s no way to make this plot sound less crazed than it is, so let’s have a paragraph break.

Ok, so Veera’s now extra-sensitive about kids, which explains why he only springs back into action after he, now working for a failing security company, hears the cries of distressed children after the ISIS-style ISS terrorists take over Chennai’s East Coast Mall. These terrorists are ruthless, as we can tell by the way that one of them back-hands a lady and traumatizes a crying girl. (among other things) ISS’s terrorists are led by Saif (Ankur Ajit Vikal), who spends most of the movie wearing a Latex mask that weirdly resembles Anton LaVey, and his traitorous accomplice, the Indian government’s unnamed Home Minister (Shaji Chen), as we see in an early scene.

The cartoonishly ruthless nature of Saif’s guys is a given. Or maybe it’s just not emphasized as often as Veera’s equally brutal counter-measures. There’s also nothing apologetic or conflicted about the violence in the movie, which is effectively played for kicks in a handful of action-intensive set pieces. In an early scene, Veera also slices off one masked villain’s arm by the elbow joint. And he stabs two ISS terrorists to death in front of a captive audience of mall hostages. Between murders, Veera plays dead in order to fake out his second victim. “This is all normal,” he tells the hostages after he knifes the second guy in the head. The crowd seems to believe Veera since, in a later scene, a very nervous civilian (prolific Tamil comedian Yogi Babu , of course) is beaten up by ISS’ terrorists, but refuses to snitch on Veera.

Vijay is not as inspiring in “Beast” as he was as recently as last year’s “Master,” though neither movie is disappointing. “Beast” only feels relatively minor because it’s overstuffed with tangential showcases for comic side characters, like peevish negotiator Althaf (Hollywood director Selvaraghavan) or bumbling security company boss Dominic (VTV Ganesh). Some of these characters are barely in the movie, like Veera’s love interest Preethi ( Pooja Hegde ) and her persistent fiancé Ram (Sathish Krishnan).

In time, the movie’s routine narrative digressions also seem normal enough since, according to Yogi Babu’s sub-pot, it takes a village to support Chennai’s own John McClane. Luckily, Vijay makes up for lost time during the movie’s energetic action scenes, most of which are as polished and well-designed as they need to be. Vijay’s dancing hasn’t improved much, but he looks more comfortable making photo booth-worthy faces (mostly pouts and snarls) while firing a big gun in slow-motion.

The key to enjoying “Beast” is accepting its inelegant, inconsistent, and often insane terms and conditions. There’s so much of everything—and in such haphazard portions!—that the main thing holding this thing together often seems to be the movie’s centralized location and Vijay’s abundant and well-advertised swagger. He’s almost as good as he needs to be here, and it’s hard to stay mad at a movie where bloody violence and/or corny jokes frequently break out in a mall that advertises for Basics, Pantaloons, and the Fruit Shop on Greams Road. Watching the movie’s ensemble cast members valiantly struggle to make this ungainly action-comedy seem even sort of normal is usually more engaging than the movie’s big action scenes, too. By the time Vijay breaks out his in-line skates, everything that doesn’t quite work about “Beast” only enhances the movie’s genuinely endearing too-much-ness.

Now playing in theaters.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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Beast (2022)

Thalapathy Vijay as Veeraraghavan

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The first reactions for George Miller’s “ Furiosa ” have trickled in on social media ahead of the movie’s world premiere later this month at the Cannes Film Festival, and it appears the “Mad Max: Fury Road” director has another amazing action epic on his hands.

“Brings me great joy to report that ‘Furiosa’ is really, really fucking good,” IndieWire film critic David Ehrlich wrote on X. “Operates in an extremely different gear than ‘Fury Road’ (in ways that i suspect will frustrate some people), but also manages to make that movie even richer while carving its own legend in the wasteland.”

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Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the title role from Charlize Theron in this prequel, which follows Furiosa as she’s kidnapped from her home as a young child by the Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and his Biker Horde and seeks vengeance and a reunion with her family and her homeland.

Journalist Simon Thompson added in his reaction: “Jesus George Miller! ‘Furiosa’ engulfs you. At times it almost seems to exceed the canvas of the IMAX format it is THAT big – and yet at times has a deeply affecting intimacy. Echoing cinematic elements from the 50s through the 80s, it’s a rich, smart vision the cast revels in.”

Speaking to  Total Film magazine last month, Miller’s longtime producing partner Doug Mitchell let it slip that “Furiosa” contains “one 15-minute sequence which took us 78 days to shoot” and required 200 stunt people on set daily.

“Furiosa” will open in theaters May 24 from Warner Bros. after its Cannes world premiere.

brings me great joy to report that Furiosa is really, *really* fucking good. operates in an extremely different gear than Fury Road (in ways that i suspect will frustrate some people), but also manages to make that movie even richer while carving its own legend in the wasteland. — david ehrlich (@davidehrlich) May 7, 2024

George Miller’s #Furiosa is powerhouse action filmmaking at its absolute best! A ferocious & relentlessly paced epic that expands the story of Furiosa and the Wasteland while delivering the craziest chases, the most bombastic characters & just plain stunning cinematography.… pic.twitter.com/tLEADO3Zc2 — Erik Davis (@ErikDavis) May 7, 2024

Well, I saw Furiosa tonight and it was great. — Esther Zuckerman (@ezwrites) May 7, 2024

Jesus George Miller! #Furiosa engulfs you. At times it almost seems to exceed the canvas of the #IMAX format it is THAT big – and yet at times has a deeply affecting intimacy. Echoing cinematic elements from the 50s through the 80s, it’s a rich, smart vision the cast revels in 👍 pic.twitter.com/1C7NWHqUJ7 — Simon Thompson (@ShowbizSimon) May 7, 2024

Heavy metal cinema. Has all the fire & brimstone of Fury Road but still delivers something entirely unique. George Miller is a movie making God. Anya Taylor-Joy is a MOVIE star. Chris Hemsworth’s delivers the best role of his career. Furiosa is why we go to the movies. https://t.co/EPW9H8LxV9 — Joe (@Cinema_Joe23) May 7, 2024

I would and could easily watch 15 hours of Anya Taylor Joy and Alyla Browne as #Furiosa , however much of her film struggles with inconsistent pacing due to the segmented story. This won't match up to Fury Road's splendor but it also doesn't need to. #IMAX pic.twitter.com/q1vyUpYJeK — therese lacson • 宋蕾蕾 (@bamfpire) May 7, 2024

FURIOSA is a visceral triumph. An epic trip through Miller's scorched wasteland that spans decades. The emotional journey is intimately personal and deeply moving. Action is ferocious, wild and unrelenting. Hold tight and brace for fury. pic.twitter.com/r8OOSCsrNt — Heroes Unbound (@HeroesUnbound) May 7, 2024

Even though I understand what it takes to make a film, I still don’t understand how Dr. George Miller does it. I was lucky enough to see ‘Furiosa’ a month ago, and I’m still reeling at how films like his exist. It’s so intricate, detailed, and immersive. The planning and love… pic.twitter.com/Z97la2R9Ss — edgarwright (@edgarwright) May 7, 2024

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