How do we quantify our deepest feelings? They are enigmatic and instinctive -it’s difficult to say what exactly motivates them. All we know is that our feelings are very powerful, to perhaps an underwritten degree. Powerful to the point we can’t resist them, and yet they can frighten us too, in that prospect of acting on them.
In The Beast, director Bertrand Bonello has the task of conveying both the longing and fear of the sheer visceral power of emotions, and why they are fundamental in that dichotomy -and I think he does a pretty excellent job. With particular respect to that arguably greatest of human emotions, few movies so potently illustrate the primal draw of true love, but also an equally primal horror that may live on its flip side. The meanings are not always acute but they are raw. And this surely, the film contends, is better than the alternative in their theoretical absence.
The movie’s core pretense is based loosely on Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle, from which it gets its title -referring to the dread of an unknown future calamity that prompts its protagonist to live in a state of fear. It’s not quite so overt for Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) as for her literary counterpart -but she is haunted by the spectre of some tragedy she firmly believes will befall her. And this is true of three incarnations of Gabrielle across the span of more than a century. In 1910, she is a famed pianist in Paris, in 2014 she is a struggling actress in Los Angeles, and in 2044 she is a disenchanted drone in a world run by A.I., mulling over a "purification" process that would cleanse her DNA of strong emotions to equip her for better job opportunities -and in which capacity she observes these prior two lives and her relationship with a soul called Louis (George MacKay).
It's a relationship that takes very different shapes over the successive lifetimes. First he is an elegant old acquaintance with gallant affections towards her that she returns cordially but chastely; then he is a depressed and disturbed incel stalking her with violent intent while she sees him as merely a peculiar neighbour -though one to whom she feels a strange kinship. Lastly, that mysterious connection is present too towards a shy fellow innocent lured into purification and fearful of the effect it will take. Connective details cross each life -in 1910 Gabrielle owns a doll-making factory and in 2044 she identifies the people who have undertaken purification, like her vacant 'nanny' Kelly (Guslagie Malanda), as dolls. In 1910, she meets a clairvoyant about her premonition, whose enigmatic predictions flash-forward into the next life, where they are echoed by a sketchy internet medium to the Gabrielle there. Bonello layers in certain recurring actions, phrases, motifs -the movie opens on actress Gabrielle rehearsing a scene in front of a green-screen (a sly commentary on the impersonal nature of much of modern filmmaking -more broadly representative of society and thus the starker importance of its central tenet): she looks about her fearfully, creeps backwards towards a table and grabs for a knife -a moment we will see again twice more before she actually discovers this true beast she is preparing herself for.
The way that these things recur, are edited together in foreshadowing and allusion, there’s a sense of interconnected fate along the lines of Cloud Atlas. But Bonello’s canvas isn’t nearly so broad, and is entirely personal to the fate of this single soul navigating sharp feelings and instincts and anxieties with no reference point, until that future Gabrielle becomes cognizant of their realities. The prevailing thread for her is subconscious -which Bonello and Seydoux do a fine job illustrating- these base notions of desire and apprehension that drive her and confine her. In that 1910 segment especially, we can feel that pang of romantic and sexual longing that she is so resistant to -a sting as powerful as that in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, clearly a significant influence on this portion of the movie. And Louis calls her out on it openly at a couple points, naming love as her great fear, to which she evades, continuing so even after she makes the leap of leaving her husband for him. Their love is not consummated, it exists only in glances, an embrace, a sensual holding of hands.
Her next life pronounces her emotional solitude against the backdrop of a large modernist Beverly Hills mansion she is renting, and the preoccupation she has with web-surfing (and not very safely, her computer ultimately crashes under severe malware infection). In auditions, at a club, there is no connection she can form, however much she desires one. Opposite here we do see the absence of love embodied as a Beast, and yet Louis (Louie) in spite of everything invites a certain level of pity -a victim of violent patriarchal social expectation where he can only see himself as a victim of women; exactly the sort of guy vulnerable to the Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons of the world. Just how much capacity for empathy he's left with is ambiguous -but we see it through the lens Gabrielle sees him, wanting him to be someone she can relate to, someone she can love.
Of course it's unclear how much of this comes from 2044 Gabrielle supplanting her own soon-to-be-extinguished desire onto the visions she sees. Bonello obscures any solid reading on the matter by cutting sometimes between seemingly unrelated contexts across the timelines -though the first two are played mostly chronologically. What's indisputable though is the strength of attraction radiated through each circumstance and Gabrielle's missed chances to act on them in each life before unfortunate ends. Bonello intelligently doesn't ever attempt to explain it, just that it carries considerable power for both. But Gabrielle is preoccupied by her dread, Louie is blinded by self-loathing and preconception, both reject the chance of connection. And in this future where the opportunity to even be moved by such things is threatened, the stakes on following through on these profound age-spanning feelings are incredibly high. And if you know the James story, you have the sense where it's heading.
In channelling this complexity, Seydoux gives one of her greatest, surprisingly most versatile performances yet. A lot of it is characterized by subtlety, but that deep raw emotion breaches the surface terrifically at paramount junctures. Gabrielle epitomizes dual sides of fear and longing, and Seydoux naturally articulates both through all versions of this character whilst also honing in on their distinctness of manner, era, and situation. And MacKay is permitted an excellent demonstration of range, performing in two languages and three accents across characters with an even wider disparity of personality, and yet who share fundamental traits -most notably a certain motivating resolve and directness.
Bonello reflects the thesis of his film in his very feeling-oriented direction, emotional necessity rather than plot points driving things such as the inter-timeline juxtapositions. And he's keen to emphasize those beats of emotional power and their effect on Gabrielle and Louis, gestures or comments, the motif of Roy Orbison's "Evergreen" -itself a symbolic statement for this love across lifetimes- and the curious effect it has. The mood of any given sector of the movie is reflective of Gabrielle's perception, whether it be warm and romantically tempting, isolated and afraid, or disillusioned and vacant. In 1910 the environment is rich and ornate but claustrophobic, in 2014 it is comfortable but revealing and vulnerable. And 2044 is just cold. Bonello's future is very sterile and almost entirely empty -his own prediction of a calamity of an entirely tangible kind. Even for those humans who have not undergone purification, there is no passion -and his great warning seems to be that this is what the advancement of A.I. promises. This overwhelming power of human feeling that so much of the movie is concerned with exploring is even in its haunting qualities immensely valuable -and therein lies the tool of the Beast.
For as much as I've stressed this movie's romantic and provocative conceptual bona fides, it acts the part of a pretty captivating horror movie and grim dystopia as well, as Bonello crosses genre and teases experimentation of form in pursuit of his vision. It's ultimately a very enthralling vision, if a tragically pessimistic one. The Beast conveys the daunting power of attraction, and of love, with appropriate magnitude, shines a spotlight on its complexity and inequivalent virtue through an epic cautionary tale. The most fascinating cinematic meditation on the subject in years.
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