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‘Beast’ Review: Idris Elba Shows a Berserk African Lion Who’s Boss

It's not as ambitious as 'Nope,' but this tense survival story — set amid an out-of-control safari — is a lot more fun than brainier summer blockbusters.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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No animals were harmed in the making of “ Beast .” Frankly, it doesn’t look like any animals were even used in the making of “Beast,” but if you can get past the idea that the two-ton lion threatening Idris Elba and his family in the movie is a singularly frightening combination of ones and zeros, not killer instinct and claws, then “Beast” is a blast.

A white-knuckle “When Animals Attack!” movie in the tradition of “Jaws” and “Anaconda,” this big-budget, big-screen release features A-list actors — OK, actor , singular — and a director who knows what he’s doing: Icelandic ace Baltasar Kormákur, who cut his teeth on such nightmare-inducing man-against-nature films as “Everest” and “Adrift.” Here, the threat is a very big, very angry African cat, understandably agitated after a group of poachers slaughtered his pride, that has decided to kill every human that crosses his path. Seriously, the body count in this movie is off the charts.

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Enter Elba, who plays single dad Nate Samuels, a tough but emotionally wounded man looking to reconnect with his two daughters, Mere (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries), by bringing them to the African savanna where he met their mother. He imagines the trip as a bonding experience and perhaps a way to patch things up after a tough year. Screenwriter Ryan Engle’s otherwise lean, suspense-focused script spends a lot of energy on their backstory, fleshing out problems with the parents’ marriage, Mom’s death by cancer and how the girls are coping with that tragedy. Dad’s in the doghouse, but punching a killer lion in the kisser is a decent way to show how much he loves his girls.

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Not all lions are ferocious, Kormákur wants to make clear, including a scene where their host, Martin (South African actor Sharlto Copley, star of “District 9”), shows how the cuddly carnivores behave toward humans they trust. Martin raised an entire pride of lions on his property from cubs, and when he approaches their territory, instead of ripping him limb from limb, the two adult males rush out to greet him, putting their (CG) paws on his shoulders and licking his face. It’s like the VFX equivalent of the “Christian the Lion” viral videos you’ve probably seen online, except, because the cats aren’t real, the scene doesn’t feel as remarkable.

It’s definitely for the best that Kormákur didn’t insist on using actual lions. If you don’t know the true story of the film “Roar” and its wildly irresponsible production, give it a Google: Director Noel Marshall tried training his big-cat cast from birth, keeping lions and such around the house for years. When it came time to shoot, he endangered his own family, as wife (and “The Birds” star) Tippi Hedren and daughter Melanie Griffith were both mauled in the making of the film.

Here, Martin takes Nate and his daughters out for a mini-safari, not realizing there’s a rogue lion on the loose. The first couple of attacks happen off-camera, as Kormákur shows the victim’s face just before a loud Dolby snarl makes the megaplex walls vibrate. Cut to black. He saves the big reveal for Nate and his daughters, who’ve exposed themselves by stepping out of the (limited) safety of Martin’s reinforced SUV. Their behavior may be risky as hell, but half the fun of the movie comes from wanting to shout at these characters to get back in the bloody car.

The movie would be pretty boring if they just huddled up there waiting for help to arrive. Instead, Kormákur commits to the R rating, piling one threat on top of another. Turns out, Martin’s an “anti-poacher” (he shoots the guys who shoot the animals on his preserve), which makes things pretty tense when the poachers from the opening scene show up, armed to the teeth — like the guerrillas from Elba’s other African-beast movie, “Beasts of No Nation.” In theory, this would mean that Martin and the lion are on the same side, although there’s no reasoning with a carnivore that feels so threatened, it will proactively attack with no intention of eating its prey.

Don’t be surprised to find a decent segment of the audience rooting for the lion — not against the Samuels clan, but against the movie’s other, more villainous characters. If a human being had suffered the same indignity this lion does in the opening scene, having its entire family slaughtered by men with guns, we’d be cheering for him to get his revenge. But Kormákur never really adopts the animal’s POV, so we’re not invited to empathize with it so much as recognize that this atypical aggression has been provoked by the poachers.

That’s where he’s lucky to have Elba, who plainly insisted on playing someone with a complicated psychology, even if all the script required was a man tough enough to take the climactic mauling “Beast” has in store for Nate. Like the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, Elba is an incredibly physical performer who instinctively comes up with little bits of business to reveal the personality of his character. The ending is ludicrous, and yet it works because of all that Elba has invested in making this protective papa convincing. That’s the beauty of “Beast”: The lion may look fake, but the stakes feel real.

Reviewed at Burbank 16, Los Angeles, Aug. 16, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 93 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release and presentation of a Will Packer Prods., RVK Studios production. Producers: Will Packer, Baltasar Kormákur, James Lopez. Executive producers: Bernard Bellew, Jaime Primak Sullivan.
• Crew: Director: Baltasar Kormákur. Screenplay: Ryan Engle; story: Jaime Primak Sullivan. Camera: Philippe Rousselot. Editor: Jay Rabinowitz. Editor: Steven Price.
• With: Idris Elba, Sharlto Copley, Iyana Halley, Leah Jeffries.

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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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‘beast’ review: idris elba tangles with the king of the jungle in tense but silly survival thriller.

Sharlto Copley also stars in Baltasar Kormákur's nightmare safari in which a desperate father is driven to protect his daughters from a vengeful lion.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Idris elba says playing villainous characters can be a "bit of therapy", isla fisher, josette simon, nico parker, leila farzad join renée zellweger in new 'bridget jones' movie.

Beast wants to have it both ways. Ryan Engle’s script, from a story by Jaime Primak Sullivan, loads up on gore and distressingly close calls amped up with effective jump scares. But it’s not content to give us dumb hair-raising fun; it also aims to move us with the tender feelings and frictions of a family ruptured by tragedy. What’s more, it asks us to accept a citified guy who appears never before to have handled a rifle instantly becoming Indiana Jones.

It’s a testament to the charisma and natural gravitas of Elba that we even halfway buy Dr. Nate Samuels as he dodges the massive rogue male lion, at one point simultaneously stopping a deadly boomslang snake mid-strike. When he’s wading around in crocodile-infested waters, I kept expecting him to punch one of those leathery mothers in the mouth, Lara Croft-style.

A tense prologue shows poachers under the cloak of night wrapping up a successful hunt, during which they have killed a pride of lions, whose teeth, claws and bones fetch big money on the black market. Only the patriarch of the pride eludes them, its paw prints indicating its mighty size. A handful of men stay behind to kill the creature before it comes after them. But its stealth in the tall grass proves too much for them.

Kormákur follows the old rule of holding off on showing the monster, seen only in the briefest flash as it leaps out of the darkness onto an unfortunate poacher.

Recently widowed Dr. Nate arrives with his 18-year-old daughter Mere (Iyana Halley) and her 13-year-old sister Norah (Leah Jeffries) at a remote location deep in the South African bushland, met there by family friend Martin ( Sharlto Copley ), a wildlife expert who manages the nature reserve.

Nate first met his wife there through Martin, and the trip to some degree has been planned to bridge the distance that’s opened up between him and Mere since her mother’s death. The couple had mutually agreed to separate, and Mere blames her dad for not being there as her mother’s health declined. In routine fashion, Nate also beats himself up for not being a sharp enough doctor to spot the cancer and stop it in its tracks.

But when Martin spots what appears to be a bullet wound in the paw of one of the females, he insists they stop by a local village to investigate. The fresh carnage they find there is alarming evidence of a lion behaving abnormally, entering a populated settlement and indiscriminately killing without eating its prey. A mountain in their path blocks the jeep’s radio signal, leaving the group with minimal protection when the grieving lion charges at them.

Unlike, say, Disney’s unnecessary live-action remake of The Lion King , which just seemed like another form of animation, minus the heart, the CG lion here is a fearsome, photo-realistic creature. The relentlessness with which it pounds the jeep, crashing through windows and swiping at the trembling family inside, makes for some pulse-pounding sequences.

Halley and Jeffries are terrific as young women suddenly given something more legitimate to complain about than the lack of WiFi or cell reception. And the script gives them just enough courage and resourcefulness to have a hand in the family’s survival, without veering into ridiculousness. That’s not always the case with Nate, who is forced to take charge when Martin is immobilized by a severe mauling. Suspension of disbelief is required more than once, notably when the lion is only inches away from Nate but appears to have no sense of smell. Maybe its nose got damaged while pulverizing the jeep’s windscreen?

As man vs. beast stories go, this one is neither the best nor the worst. Steven Price’s score keeps the tension high, and Elba and Copley are good enough actors to deliver even the most pedestrian dialogue with conviction. It also helps that the movie runs a tight 90 minutes. Beast is no Jaws , but it’s no Jaws: The Revenge , either.

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‘Beast’ is a dumb but genuinely pulse-pounding creature feature

Idris Elba elevates the tale of a man facing down a marauding lion

The marauding-animal thriller is a horror staple, reliably cropping up in late summer, as evidenced by “Piranha” (Aug. 3, 1978), “Cujo” (Aug. 12, 1983), “Arachnophobia” (July 18, 1990), “Burning Bright” (Aug. 17, 2010), “The Meg” (Aug. 10, 2018) and a host of other fauna-centric titles before, since and in between, representing a virtual Noah’s ark of scare-inducing species. In that lineage falls “Beast,” the latest entry in the dog days canon of cautionary tales pitting man vs. Mother Nature’s less well-behaved progeny. If the film is elevated by the great Idris Elba — playing an American widower on safari in South Africa with his two daughters who must face down a rogue lion bent on, for lack of a better word, revenge — it nevertheless falls squarely in the camp of formula.

Meaning that “Beast” obeys certain rules, and does so effectively yet predictably, under the stewardship of director Baltasar Kormakur, a filmmaker who, since making his name in Iceland, has staked out a patch of the Hollywood turf reserved for such mindless if visceral thrillers as “ Adrift ” and “ Everest .”

“Beast” is a legitimately scary movie, opening with a prologue in which we watch a group of poachers massacre several lions, then get massacred themselves, one by one, by the film’s titular critter: a convincing CGI cat that then goes on a human-killing rampage, not eating his prey — random villagers, surviving poachers, etc. — as an ordinary lion might, but in a sense stalking and killing them out of some anthropomorphic sense of justice. Into that unlikely scenario wanders Elba’s Nate and daughters Meredith and Norah (Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries), who are on a mission of reconciliation after their African-born mother has died while estranged from Nate, leaving the film’s hero with some healing to do.

It’s not just reconciliation he seeks, but redemption for being absent from his family during their time of need. And as everyone knows, redemption, at least in Hollywood, requires sacrifice. All this falls into place, like a morality play, against a scenic backdrop, with solid performances rendered by the aforementioned actors and Sharlto Copley, who plays an old friend of the family and their tour guide to the wildlife preserve in which the action takes place.

And action-packed it is, even if much of the story unspools inside a disabled Land Rover containing the main characters, with said lion on the warpath outside and not much in the human arsenal except a tranquilizer gun, a few bottles of water, handheld radios, a medical kit and their wits.

The jump scares are genuinely jumpy, but the film plays out more like a theme park ride than a family drama with teeth. It’s pulse-pounding, in other words, from a cardiac perspective, but not especially engaging as a narrative, despite the earnest efforts of the cast to breathe life into a personal story arc that feels pasted onto another one: one that is, in essence, the tale of a dumb but deeply disagreeable beast.

R. At area theaters. Contains violence, bloody images and some coarse language. 93 minutes.

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The Beast review: Léa Seydoux leads a mesmeric blend of sci-fi, horror and romance

The works of french filmmaker bertrand bonello are designed to provoke – and this time-hopping drama, co-starring george mackay, is no different, article bookmarked.

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The future presented in The Beast , Bertrand Bonello’s mesmeric blend of sci-fi, horror and romance, feels frighteningly plausible. In the wake of disaster, AI has taken on the responsibility of running civilisation , leaving 67 per cent of humanity unemployed. Decisions, now, are made entirely without bias or empathy, so that when Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) attempts to seek more fulfilling work, she’s forced to undergo a process of “purification”, in which her past lives, and all their inherited trauma, are scrubbed clean from her DNA.

The notion that we carry our ancestors’ sorrows, one proposed by certain corners of the scientific community, is an unnerving one. Here, the French filmmaker suggests it may be the true explanation for the amorphous “beast” once described in a Henry James novella . Its story concerns a man who rejects love and stability because he’s convinced some terrible catastrophe, moving unseen like a creature in the jungle, will one day strike him down. Gabrielle feels the same, and in Bonello’s sad, unshakeable film, it’s suggested that perhaps her fears are justified – some of us, it seems, are simply fated to be plagued by the same, cyclic miseries.

There are three timelines at play here: the future, in 2044; the present(ish), in 2014; and the past, in 1910. In all three, there is a Gabrielle and there is a Louis (George MacKay, who took on the role after the death of Gaspard Ulliel , to whom this film is dedicated). In the 1910 sections, Bonello comes the closest to plainly adapting James’s novella, 1903’s The Beast in the Jungle . We’re in Paris, during the Belle Époque, and Gabrielle is an accomplished pianist who denies Louis’s advances in an attempt to stave off the doom. MacKay supplies dignified, courtly yearning – in one scene he snaps his eyes shut and you can almost see, dancing across his features, the daydream of leaning across to kiss Gabrielle’s lips.

In 2044, Louis is another candidate for the process of purification, another soul pledged to never feel a true and powerful emotion ever again. But it’s in the contemporary section, in 2014, that Bonello best deploys his web of Lynchian symbols – each timeline, in some way, features a clairvoyant, a bird as the harbinger of ill, and a doll as a totem of innocence (in the future, it’s an android played, with poignant restraint, by Saint Omer ’s Guslagie Malanda).

In 2014, self-imposed isolation, when mixed with hatred and entitlement, turns dangerous – in a way that suggests that, while fear and loneliness are part of the universal experience, social hierarchy tends to dictate what people choose to do with those emotions. Here, Gabrielle is an actor in Los Angeles, paid to replicate extreme emotions against an endless void of green screen. Louis, meanwhile, is a violent misogynist, whose video manifestos could almost be direct translations of those made by the man who shot and murdered six people in Santa Barbara, California, on 23 May 2014. McKay finds the necessary, chilling balance between disturbing and deeply pathetic. Seydoux’s terror, in response, seems infinite – inviting in all that is material and immaterial, simultaneously becoming a woman living in everyday fear of men, and a woman in touch with some primordial knowledge of her own mortality.

Bonello, whose films – among them Nocturama and Zombi Child – are made to provoke, does not leave us entirely hopeless. In 2044, Gabrielle faces a hard bargain: would permanent serenity be worth the loss of every great piece of art made by those brave enough to face their pain? As she insists, in 2014: “There must be beautiful things in this chaos.” The Beast does its best to seek them out.

Dir: Bertrand Bonello. Starring: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasovai. Cert 15, 145 mins

‘The Beast’ is in cinemas from 31 May

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Moll, a young redheaded woman, puts on a yellow sundress and stares at herself in the mirror. Downstairs, guests gather for her birthday party. Moll's shoulders hunch inwards, her arms are tense. It is as though her body revolts against taking up space, being visible. She stands on the sidelines of her own party like a wraith, sadness seeping out in moments when she thinks no one is looking. In an early voiceover, she states she has always been obsessed with killer whales, those huge creatures who are "always smiling." It's hard to associate this obsession with such a frail-looking put-upon young woman. By the end of "Beast," Michael Pearce's remarkable first feature, we more than understand. 

The aforementioned birthday party sets up Moll's home life: She lives with her parents on the island of Jersey. She has a nothing job as a tour guide. Her father is descending into dementia, and Moll is required to do her part and take care of him. Her mother ( Geraldine James , in a truly chilling performance) keeps Moll on the shortest of possible leashes, for reasons which aren't entirely clear at first. After Moll's sister hijacks the birthday party by announcing she's pregnant with twins, Moll flees into the night, looking for ... she doesn't know what. She heads to a nearby bar, where she meets a guy and they dance til dawn, but afterwards, on the beach, he won't take "No" for an answer. They tussle. This potentially violent situation is broken up by a rifle-wielding mysterious stranger, who threatens the guy off and then offers to drive Moll home. This is Pascal ( Johnny Flynn ), a charismatic soft-faced guy with dirt under his fingernails and a thick crop of blonde hair.

Moll looks at Pascal as though he is oxygen. He's a kind of grubby White Rabbit, leading Alice away from the social and civilized world. (The fact that he's an illegal poacher, with a bucket of rabbit pelts in the back seat of his jeep, helps land the metaphor.) Into her narrow life has stepped this gorgeous and wild figure, who - for reasons mysterious - has chosen her . She flings herself into the experience so wholeheartedly you worry for her. Pascal lights up a cigarette indoors, he tracks dirt on the carpet, he shatters social niceties, saying to Moll in front of her mother, "Let's go out and get shit-faced."  It's a world so strict that Pascal wearing black jeans to the country club is almost as scandalous as Bette Davis wearing a red ballgown in "Jezebel". To Moll, he is life itself. And yet ... from the jump, we have our doubts about him. For some time, girls have been going missing all over the island. A dead girl is found buried in a field. Locals go on search parties. Hysterical updates dominate the news. 

One of the strengths of the film, also written by Pearce, is how much it is willing to withhold, without descending into "Gotcha!" manipulation. A key revelation about Moll doesn't come out until nearly the end of the film. Information about Pascal is also slow to arrive. What we hear is not good, but we are left in an uncertain state, with only our suspicions and speculations, adding to the generally paranoid atmosphere. Jersey, gorgeously shot by Benjamin Kračun, is a place of crashing surf, towering rock cliffs, impenetrable dark forests: in "Beast" civilization is a paper-thin layer over pure chaos.

Jessie Buckley gives what can only be called a breakout performance as Moll. She is a revelation. Perhaps because she is an unknown, it is never completely clear what she is going to do from one moment to the next. She is thrillingly alive, with waves of feeling erupting over her face, whether she's struggling against the shame spiral her mother puts her through, or feverishly reaching for Pascal's fly as they tryst in an empty forest glade. Sometimes she subsides into a strange blankness, or bursts forth in tremulous quivering need. When the film opens, Moll is already in a devastated state. Her family life is claustrophobic. Her mother is unpredictable, and yet so in control Moll cannot wriggle free. In an argument, her mother's goal is to crush Moll's sense of self and agency. Once she accomplishes that (and it's not hard), she shifts abruptly, saying, "Let's be friends again." With all of the terrors in "Beast," the most frightening thing may be the mother-daughter relationship.

Pascal and Moll hold within them the potential of many deadly lover-duos in cinema, Kit and Holly in " Badlands ," or Bonnie and Clyde. For a while, it seems like they might be on the road to going the outlaw route, but "Beast" has other things up its sleeve. The police-procedural aspect of the film is pretty stock stuff, with the cops circling Pascal, closing in on him. "Whodunit" is important, but it's not the really the true engine of the film. The engine of the film is the gradual transformation of Moll, masterfully tracked by Buckley in such a gradual arc you might miss what's happening at first. The delicate sad girl in a yellow sundress gets dirtier and dirtier, as though retreating to her proper and mostly uncivilized state. It is who she wants to be, and eventually she is so feral it makes you wonder uneasily if her mother kept her on a short leash for a reason. Once out of the confines of her family, Moll is dangerously unmoored. In this, the film reminded me of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" (which also, incidentally, features a rabbit as a central motif), where Catherine Deneuve gives a great performance as a dissociated young woman, so dominated and bossed by her older sister she completely falls apart once left to her own devices. 

Buckley goes as far as the material requires her to go, and then goes even further than that. Flynn, too, gives a terrifically suggestive performance. The two are amazing onscreen together. You don't know which one to look at, their dynamic is so strange and alive. Who's the predator and who's the prey here?

"Beast" doesn't entirely hold together, but it's never less than fascinating to watch, mainly because it keeps so close to Moll's point of view, trapping us in her belljar. This is an extremely strong first feature from Pearce, and Buckley is riveting. You can't look away.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Beast (2018)

107 minutes

Jessie Buckley as Moll

Johnny Flynn as Pascal

Geraldine James as Hilary

Charley Palmer Rothwell as Leigh

Hattie Gotobed as Jade

Shannon Tarbet as Polly

• Michael Pearce

Cinematographer

• Benjamin Kracun
• Maya Maffioli
• Jim Williams

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

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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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Critic’s pick

‘The Beast’ Review: Master of Puppets

Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers in three different eras, is an audacious sci-fi romance.

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By Beatrice Loayza

Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” is an audacious interdimensional romance, techno-thriller and Los Angeles noir rolled up in one. This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.

The prologue shows a green-screen shoot in which Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) takes directions from a presence off camera and, with expert professionalism, braces herself to confront an imaginary monster. The effect is uncanny, wryly funny, weirdly sensual and very sad. Bonello sustains this unsettling tone throughout the film, although the individual parts are less consistent. This is the toll of shifting time periods, from a costume drama to a modern mockery of incel culture.

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With computer-generated imagery, any opponent — and any era — can materialize in the background. What does this mean for actors? The feeling that great forces move us like puppets runs through Bonello’s genre-bending work (in his 2017 film, “ Nocturama ,” a gang of teenage terrorists hide in a shopping mall and see themselves reflected in the consumerist sprawl).

“The Beast” follows Gabrielle and Louis (George MacKay), who are lovers, in three incarnations, through three timelines: Paris circa 1910, when the city flooded; Los Angeles in the 2010s; and Paris in 2044, a near-future in which artificial intelligence has almost overtaken the work force.

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Léa Seydoux’s The Beast is one of this year's best movies

The Dune: Part Two star is outstanding in a romantic sci-fi epic that defies categorisation.

Bertrand Bonello's outstanding ability to marry genres, build bridges between past and present and combine dense philosophical explorations with a soul-touching love story makes it a must-see movie this year.

It's a bold, romantic sci-fi epic that defies categorisation. It's also quite long, demanding, and at times even bonkers, but it's worth every single minute.

Inspired by Henry James's 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle , the movie follows fated lovers Gabrielle (a magnificent Léa Seydoux ) and Louis ( 1917 's George MacKay ) through their diverse reincarnations in 1910, 2014 and 2044.

Their connection survives, even if the memories of their past lives have long been forgotten, as they navigate an ever-changing world that always seems to be on the verge of disaster.

The futuristic setting (2044) is dominant, placed in a dystopian France where AI controls every aspect of human life. Here, there's a common procedure to purify one's DNA in order to be more efficient at work. That is, to remove all emotions and remnants of the past in order to achieve the ideal of a productive individual in a tech-dominated and painfully lifeless society.

Gabrielle is not entirely sold on the idea.

In Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle , the main character ruins his chances of love and marriage because of his obsession with an impending catastrophe, which he calls a "beast", that lies in wait for him. By the end, he will learn that his fatalist view got in the way of his happiness, as he was never able to love freely.

The similarities with The Beast are evident beyond the shortened title, but Bonello expands it in time, amplifies the scale and delivers thought-provoking ideas in his best movie to date.

The French director also makes that haunting disaster (or "beast") more tangible while playing with different settings and movie genres.

Chronologically, the story starts during Paris' Belle Époque in the early 1900s. Gabrielle and Louis meet and fall in love shortly before 1910's Great Flood, which sank the French capital under the Seine's waters. This setting is delicate and melancholic, a period romance in the likes of The Age of Innocence .

In the second time period, the same characters are living in modern-day Los Angeles, with Gabrielle now struggling as an aspiring actor and Louis revealing himself as a dangerous incel who is stalking her. Bonello was inspired by real-life American mass murderer Elliot Rodger, even including lines from his infamous misogynist manifesto.

This too-close-for-comfort part of the movie feels at times like a slasher, while the third location (a futuristic Paris) taps into the dystopian sci-fi tradition.

Each period represented in the movie contains both society's collective traumas and the character's personal nightmares — tech anxieties and inescapable loneliness, toxic masculinity and frustrated desires, environmental disasters and the impossibility of love.

At the heart of all of them is the unease of how to find happiness when the world is a dark place to live. It's about how fate is a double-edged sword, too.

As is obvious by this point, The Beast is a beast of a movie, packed with all kinds of different elements that, honestly, shouldn't work at all. But it does, and in a stunning way, mainly because the movie never forgets about the characters' emotions. After all, there is one more movie genre Bonello is playing with: the melodrama.

For all the complexities we can find in The Beast , its message is simple — embracing our fears, anxieties and vulnerability is the only way to embrace love.

The Beast is now out in UK cinemas.

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Deputy Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over seven years, mostly for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas . 

Her work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema in the UK. 

She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service .    During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world, and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London.     Now based in the UK, Mireia joined Digital Spy in June 2023 as Deputy Movies Editor. 

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The Beast (w/writer-director Bertrand Bonello)

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• May 29, 2024 (United Kingdom)
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