In the Dark Reviews

I don't know what I was expecting from an extremely loose sci-fi adaptation of Henry James' 1903 novella "The Beast in the Jungle," but I don't think anyone could have expected Bertrand Bonello's "The Beast."

When he was 12, Bonello became interested in film after watching horror movies from directors, including David Cronenberg, George A. Romero, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Bonello's taste has always been top-notch.

But with "The Beast," Bonello quietly goes for broke in recreating a subgenre that Seth McFarlane's "Family Guy" amusingly reduced to "a depressing 1970s sci-fi movie starring a guy in a turtleneck."

Although "The Beast" features a near-total absence of turtlenecks, its dystopian near-future meets the pre-"Star Wars" 1970s sci-fi marks of highlighting starkly brutalist architectural design, interspersed with decaying classical buildings, and dressing its protagonists in default shades of earth tones and gray.

As close as I can come to coherently encapsulating its plot is to identify the central thread of its repeated missed connections between Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle and George MacKay as Louis, who come tantalizingly close to becoming lovers across multiple lifetimes.

Because in Bonello's imagined future, the existence of past lives has not only been proven, but people are offered the option of reliving key parts of those past lives, to resolve the traumas that artificial intelligence has concluded makes those people too emotional to function in society.

This future, set in France in 2044, takes place after an unnamed event that devastates humanity enough for the management of civilization to be peacefully turned over to artificial intelligence.

As a result, the vast majority of the human race is materially comfortable but unemployed, even though the clean, but mostly empty cityscapes, indicate far fewer human beings are alive in this future than now.

To "purify" herself enough to be suitable for higher-level employment, Gabrielle relives her past lives, first as a pianist and the co-owner of a doll factory with her husband in Paris in 1910, then as a model and aspiring actress who is house-sitting for an absent family in Los Angeles in 2014.

While James' "The Beast in the Jungle" explores the concept of an inexorable fate through what amounts to a self-fulfilling premonition, Bonello's "The Beast" uses the historically fixed fates of Gabrielle's past lives to underscore the underlying sense of doom that extends across those lifetimes, since by definition, we know each of her past lives must come to an end.

Bonello loves playing with recurring motifs, from intrusive pigeons and cryptic psychics, to the song "Evergreen" and the same dialogue repeated by different characters in each lifetime, and he's very effective at weaponizing those persistent elements to make us feel Gabrielle's dread.

Seydoux has found no shortage of success in more mainstream Hollywood productions, with prominent roles in films by Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, Woody Allen and Wes Anderson, and popcorn franchises such as the "Mission: Impossible" and James Bond movies.

But even with her work in critical and commercial juggernauts such as Denis Villeneuve's "Dune: Part Two," Seydoux has demonstrated an abiding affinity for more experimental or transgressive films, such as 2013's "Blue Is the Warmest Colour" and 2015's "The Lobster," so chalk up "The Beast" as another win for her wild side.

As for MacKay, whom I last saw racing through Sam Mendes' 2019 World War I film "1917," "The Beast" affords him yet another opportunity to flex his period-piece muscles, but it also allows him to dig into characterization that's a bit more substantive than the "doe-eyed boy who's seen some stuff" archetype, especially during sequences set in 2014 Los Angeles, that capture its zeitgeist with laugh-out-loud morbid accuracy.

Even MacKay's stilted attempt at an American accent suits his overly rehearsed 2014 character, a personality type that's become all too common in the internet era.

"The Beast" is the kind of sci-fi film I thought filmmakers stopped making after "Logan's Run" in 1976, or perhaps more precisely, after John Boorman's "Zardoz" in 1974, and its final knife-twist is so unrepentantly Seventies that it deserves to be seen in theaters.

I predict a lot of moviegoers will react to "The Beast" much like "The Simpsons" meme of Krusty the Clown reacting to the cartoon "Worker and Parasite," to the point that Bonello might as well have ended it with the words "Endut! Hoch Hech!" but that's exactly why I'm so impressed by it.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]