Most filmmakers will never need to locate the rhythm in cross-cutting between multiple time periods separated by a half-century or more and augmented by sometimes-obtuse sci-fi concepts; it simply isn’t a common occurrence outside of movies like Cloud Atlas, of which there are vanishingly few in the grand scheme of things. Say this for Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast: It is, in fact, a movie like Cloud Atlas. Not as good, not as arresting, not as visually stunning, but nonetheless a sort-of-humanist, sort-of-sci-fi story that places its leading actors in multiple storylines taking place decades or more apart. That alone is exciting, even as the movie demonstrates just how difficult a feat this is to pull off.
If you’re going to watch an actress for a century-plus, however, Léa Seydoux is a solid choice. She plays Gabrielle, a woman in 2044 who is prodded into having her DNA “purified,” a common procedure in a world where artificial intelligence has rendered human employment largely obsolete. People can re-enter the workforce by having their memories and emotions more or less purged, rendering them closer to employable automatons. This evocatively depicted process zaps Gabrielle into a kind of dream-memory state where she recalls past lives in 1910 and 2014. In both of them, as well as in 2044, she crosses paths with versions of Louis (George MacKay). Are they star-crossed lovers, or something more malleable? Does our body contain memories past our physical lives? And how, by the way, does Bonello adapt (however loosely) a Henry James novella (The Beast in the Jungle) that was published seven years before this movie’s earliest timeline?
If it all sounds heady, it’s actually more straightforward to describe than to experience. Bonello makes a peculiar structural choice to cut back and forth primarily between 2044 and 1910, where Gabrielle and Louis meet in Paris shortly before the city is flooded, before ending the 1910 story and fully introducing the 2014 storyline while only occasionally checking back in with 2044. If the 1910 story is the most traditionally and romantically tragic, it’s the 2014 piece that holds the most actual suspense. In this recent past, Gabrielle is a model struggling to make it as an actress, housesitting and dissatisfied in Los Angeles, while Louis is a disgruntled incel type lurking in the periphery of her life, making online videos and clearly preparing to do something awful. Their series of near-misses, punctuated by Los Angeles misery, is so absorbing that you might forget the slivers of 2044 stuff entirely, which is intriguing but vague.
This works to sustain tension in the moment, but leaves the movie feeling distended and misshapen. This could well be intentional; rather than knocking off the endless propulsion of something like Cloud Atlas, Bonello may want to keep audiences a different kind of alert, uncertain of how or where they will be allowed to linger. To be sure, there are some arresting, beautiful images at play in all of the timelines: In 1910, of characters floating through the flood waters; in 2014, a sustained shot of Gabrielle at the wheel of her car, lit and haloed by the headlights of Louis’s SUV tailing her; in 2044, glimpses of the weird sensory bath Gabrielle takes as part of the cleansing process.
Despite Seydoux’s uniquely magnetic ennui – could any other contemporary actress imbue a beautifully bored model with such empathy? — and MacKay’s gameness to bring a little nuance to a real creep in the 2014 section, The Beast has an undercurrent of restlessness, maybe even listlessness. The engine that should be shuttling it between time periods sometimes goes idle, and it becomes, especially for many of its early passages, an opaque curiosity. The absences Bonello seems interested in – there’s an evocative recurrence of Gabrielle shooting a project via green screen – threaten to overtake the film. “Can you get scared by something that’s not actually here?” someone asks at one point. Certainly you can. It may be harder, though, to be transported by the same.
Director: Bertrand Bonello
Writer: Bertrand Bonello, Guillaume Bréaud, Benjamin Charbit
Starring: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova
Release Date: October 8, 2023 (New York Film Festival)
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.