Beast
From the start of Beast, Michael Pearce’s excellent feature debut, his protagonist Moll (Jessie Buckley) reads as a teen in arrested development—eventually we realize she’s a tigress living like a gazelle. Everyone preys on Moll’s perceived weakness by either pushing her around or simply ignoring her. Her mother, Hillary (Geraldine James), is both domineering and condescending toward her. Her older sister, Polly (Shannon Tarbet), takes Moll’s birthday party as an opportunity to announce she’s expecting twins. The ostensible lead in her own life, Moll is constantly outshone by her supporting cast. Rather than demand the respect she’s due, though, she meekly holds her peace.
Then she meets Pascal (Johnny Flynn) and everything changes. Theirs isn’t a meet-cute. It’s more of a meet-brute, Pascal playing her scruffy knight in tarnished armor, rescuing her from a date veering rapidly into ugly territory in yet another example of the world taking advantage of Moll’s exterior innocence. One moment, Moll is getting harassed by a drunkard who believes he’s entitled to more than what she’s willing to give. The next, Pascal, emerging seemingly from nowhere, has a rifle leveled at the man’s face. Most women might find as much relief in this scenario as fresh terror. Moll is not most women. She finds Pascal intriguing, even enchanting, in his casual violence.
Most of all she finds him a vital alternative to her family, friends and neighbors on the isle of Jersey, Pearce’s own home, an idyllic chunk of rocks and greenery between France and England. Pascal is an escape from social suffocation: He’s tough and doesn’t mince words, and yet to her he’s kind and soft spoken, invested in what she thinks and feels in ways no one else cares to be. He might also be a murderer. Beast is less Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, more Kalifornia. Jersey’s sunbathed rural charms belie the danger stalking its shores, a serial killer who has claimed three lives and possibly a fourth. Putting two and two together, Moll’s introduction to Pascal immediately puts him on the viewer’s shortlist of suspects.
The question Beast puts to us is: Does Moll give a damn? Whatever Pascal is or isn’t, he pays attention to her, and when you’re a neglected young woman whose history of adolescent violence has kept her stuck in place like an insect trapped in amber, attention tends to do the trick: We are informed that, as a teenager, Moll stabbed a classmate with a pair of scissors in what she describes as self-defense, and it’s this memory that affects how she’s seen by Jersey’s inhabitants. But Pearce doesn’t invite us to play detective. The film’s outcomes are never framed, at least for the audience, in terms of morality. What Beast asks us is to consider whether or not there’s light to be found in darkness—and vice versa.