Something wicked this way comes in the latest genre-defying drama from director Bertrand Bonello (Zombi Child).
Inscrutable yet keenly felt, this menace manifests as a premonition of doom that haunts Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux, Dune: Part Two) in the AI-dominated dystopia of 2044, and echoes throughout alternate timelines.
It’s a fear inherited from Henry James’s novella, The Beast in the Jungle, whose fatalistic protagonist succumbs to a self-fulfilling prophecy. But in the film, Bonello daringly transposes this self-contained parable into a head-spinning, two-and-a-half-hour odyssey.
In an attempt to purge her errant emotions — perceived as a threat in this era — Gabrielle subjects herself to a procedure of DNA purification that splinters her psyche across past lives. In Belle Époque France, she lives as a celebrated pianist; in the Los Angeles of 2014, she’s an aspiring actor beset by a decaying culture.
Each lifetime is indelibly marked by an encounter with George MacKay’s (1917) Louis. A fleeting stranger in her own present, he manifests as a former acquaintance who chastely pursues Gabrielle in the early 20th century, despite her marriage to a prolific doll maker. In 2014, he’s incarnated as a disturbed incel who plots a shocking act of violence.
While The Beast’s outlandish premise recalls everything from Assassin’s Creed to Cloud Atlas, Bonello takes a tantalisingly slow-burn approach. With elaborate digital spectacle and high-wire narrative acrobatics largely eschewed, it’s a startlingly intimate tale.
Léa Seydoux has long been under-served in her Hollywood appearances — few roles in cinema are as thankless as ‘James Bond’s serious girlfriend’ — and the true draw of the film is watching one of our most beguiling, multivalent actors effortlessly weave between melodrama and horror. The emotional terror of both genres thrives off the power of a good scream, which Seydoux unleashes at a nerve-shredding frequency in the film’s most haunting moments.
The ambitious balance of tones doesn’t entirely cohere, though. In contrast to 2014’s paranoid thriller and 2044’s techno existentialism, Bonello struggles to hit the notes of its 20th century costume drama.
Echoes of Last Year at Marienbad abound in the ambiguous backstory between Gabrielle and Louis; neither can quite recall how or when they’ve previously met. In contrast to Resnais’ fractured storytelling, the burgeoning romance is largely played straight here.
For all the film’s admirable restraint towards its high-concept designs, the understated execution of this timeline stifles the exquisite sense of yearning forbidden love elicits, placing the eternal soulmates on a shaky foundation.
The 2014 sequences literalise the inextricable tangle of love and fear in a heady mix of Hollywood excess, online alienation and gendered violence. Reconfigured as a seething misogynist, Louis provocatively invokes the legacy of mass-murderer Elliot Rodger in a slew of self-recorded rants, copied word-for-word from Rodger’s own infamous vlogs.
Even a decade out from the Isla Vista killings, Rodger’s diatribes have lost little of their chilling effect. The film adopts his predatory gaze as he roams the streets of LA, emitting a pulsating dread and uncanny atmosphere reminiscent of David Lynch.
Yet Gabrielle still identifies a kindred spirit in him, however briefly. Between modelling gigs, she house-sits in a Hollywood Hills mansion, her free time spent in the thrall of online seances, plastic surgery websites, and intrusive pop-up ads. An intense alienation and spiritual rot marks both their existences.
Extrapolating from the smart homes, social media and voice assistants of 2014, the film’s 2044 setting consummates the ceding of humanity to its own brilliant creations.
Gabrielle’s world is glimpsed in eerily pristine, sparsely populated cityscapes, all sculpted by an AI-powered autocracy. The extraordinary technology of DNA purification is a routine procedure intended to make Gabrielle “work ready”; in freeing ourselves of emotion, humanity has become perfectly optimised.
Films have long imagined the logical endpoint of supplanting human desire with technology; just last week, Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her made headlines again. The Beast was conceived prior to the recent proliferation of artificial intelligence, but nonetheless captures the inherent strangeness of bearing witness to its unstoppable expansion.
Many more films will no doubt be made in response to this current moment; should they possess the emotional clarity and inventiveness of what Bonello achieves here, the future of cinema may still have a fighting chance against the tide of AI.
The Beast is in cinemas now.