LGM Film Club, Part 410: The Beast

The Beast is the new film by Bertrand Bonnello. I hadn’t seen any of his previous films, but I know he is respected in the French film world. It is conceptually audacious. It follows an unconsummated romance over three periods. It starts as an adaption of the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle (I haven’t read it, but no wonder the romance is unconsummated…), with the always great Lea Seydoux pairing with the English actor George MacKay. Filmed in French and English and both actors are fluent in both, the closer it stays to James, the better. Seydoux is in a lot of films like this–where you have a high concept deal with the movie ending up as mostly a nothingburger. France is another recent example of this. She’s great, but the movie is mostly bullshit. The James stuff is fine–loneliness, attraction, secrets. But then it extends to the present–where she is an aspiring actress in LA and he is an incel who kills her or maybe doesn’t kill her, and then also to 2044, where AI has taken everything over and those who want jobs need to purify their DNA (don’t ask, there’s no answer) to move on and up. In the latter two scenarios, these characters are attracted to each other through time, through their shared past and shared secrets, for reasons not entirely clear.

The problem is that of a lot of highly acclaimed European cinema these days, which is that the films have a half-assed claim to being intellectual, but in fact are mostly pretty dumb and self-satisfied for no good reason. I have nothing negative to say about either Seydoux or MacKay here, especially the former, who really is a wonderful actor. But Christ, this movie annoyed me. I guess I’d give it 5/10 just based on the ideas and acting, but I wish people would emphasize story and script. more these days.