Beast and the Struggle to Live Off the Land

There is a shot halfway through Jack Clayton’s ghost story The Innocents, of a statue hidden behind some foliage. Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) daintily pushes past the overhanging vines to stare wide-eyed at the stone cherub, arms outstretched and grasping onto some disembodied hands. Such a moment is emblematic of Miss Giddens’ unsettling journey into paranoia, holding steadily onto something barely there, overcome by the whispering that follows her through the ornate hallways of the estate. It is also a rendering of the horror stories which have long defined the U.K. As a country, it is characterized by a haunting grasp, summarized in the image of someone holding onto something long gone.

In 2018, Beast was released, a moody psychological thriller shrouded in the shadow of the Jersey cliffs that the locals blindly wander under. Jessie Buckley’s performance as the quiet, affected Moll—lurking in her own secrets and recovering from a hazy history—is intoxicating. She is bound by the ordered hedges and the serene white of the suburbs, all of which channel the controlling edge of her mother (Geraldine Page) who surveys her daughter with perpetual disapproval.

Buckley’s embodiment of Moll propels the film into darker, undefined terrain; she bounces off the hard edges of the island, her personal history echoing across the cavernous landscape. It is only when she meets Pascal (Johnny Flynn), whose own family descended from “Norman noblemen” into a generation of handymen dismissed for their unrecognizable surname, that she finds her own pain reflected. Gradually they isolate themselves from society, moving into a cottage shrouded in the woods, stalking through the wilderness to hunt animals—literal freedom coupled with Pascal’s willingness to confront her old life. He is able to accuse Moll’s imposing family of the attitude that has been undercutting every cold, callous request leveled at her: “Where are you from? You’re on my land.”

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The U.K.’s relationship with land ownership is fraught, after large swaths of the country—and eventually the world—was co-opted by a vein of gentry, then left to crumble in the post-World War slump. Ever since then, the country has been suspended in a loop of stealing and repurposing the ground. Following the collapse of the mining industry, the British National Trust preserved parcels of land, embalming it in permanent stasis, severing it from life, leaving it to be inhumanly bandied about. Beast explicitly negotiates this, giving the theoretical debate an appropriately sinister edge as Pascal, the Jersian “native,” is accused of murdering a young girl in the area. The tragedy rips through the fabric of the community, exposing the faulty logic which has kept Moll’s family bound to the cold routine of their homes and lives, packed full of static heirlooms and empty routines.

The Lair of the White Worm earned cult classic status for its colorful costuming, which aids moments of absurdism that erupt from the muddied mundanity of rural British life. But filmmaker Ken Russell uses this varied visual language to argue that clinging to communal mythmaking has deadly consequences. After Eve (Catherine Oxenberg) is overcome by an influx of imagery calling back to the land’s storied past, she is confronted by the mythical white snake recently uncovered in her own back garden. Like the film itself, it is a deliberately goofy way of underlining a more compelling truth: Poorly concealing the history which lies ominously close to the surface will only mean it rises like a rotting corpse.

There is a primordial passion that Moll unlocks early in the film after encountering Pascal, whose wildness exposes the insubstantiality of her life so far. A few of their climactic scenes are intercut with crashing waves, to mark the natural and social rolling wordlessly into one another. The scene of Moll and Pascal sleeping together on the forest floor is followed by a near silent, static scene of Moll alone on the sofa, fingernails ragged and dragging along the pristine cream cover. Her mouth is smeared with soil and hangs askew as the camera pulls away.

The next scene follows a group of local farmers silently discovering the dead body, poorly concealed and jutting out from the ground, dominating the last act of the film. Rain pours down, washing the victim’s exposed foot and hand clean. Gleaming in the black dirt, this is reminiscent of the final frame of The Innocents, where Clayton frames the startling white of Miles’ small, crumpled body, lifeless against the blackened lawn.

Moll’s passion curdles into something unsettling by tracing the underlying animosity between people and land, threatening the balance of day-to-day life. Pascal is arrested, accused of killing the four local women whose bodies have been discarded across the island. The police haplessly concoct a trail to explain the series of victims, cornering Moll in a classroom-turned-interrogation room. “He filled her mouth with earth,” the policeman explains to Moll, who dazedly examines photos of the victim’s mutilated corpse. Her nose starts to bleed, the image of violence leaving a physical trace. “Why are you showing me these?” she asks.

This violence is given no outlet. Instead it is left to hemorrhage and seep out in violent shades of red. In tying herself to the land, Moll must commit herself to the grief of losing a life with Pascal that never truly existed. After he admits to the murder, she yanks the steering wheel of his jeep, pulling the car off the road. In the silent closing moments, she crawls across his dead body and slowly rises to face the camera, broken glass glinting across the street. Her stoic pose sees her arms glued to her side, the stark opposite of the statue Miss Giddens’ encounters in that early scene from The Innocents. She waits to be swallowed up by the woods, alone and alive.

London-based film writer Anna McKibbin loves digging into classic film stars and movie musicals. Find her on Twitter to see what she is currently obsessed with.