Film Review - La Bête (The Beast)
Léa Seydoux and George MacKay are outstanding in Bertrand Bonello's esoteric but provocative dystopian vision of humanity ruled by AI
The Beast won’t be for everyone. This surreal, deliberately paced, non-linear, dystopian doomed romance asks a lot of the audience, but sticking with it yields rich, singular rewards. Indeed, since viewing the film, I’ve found it extremely difficult to get out of my head, which is always a good sign.
In 2044, an intelligent young woman called Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is considering having virtual reality emotional surgery that dials down her passions to the socially acceptable levels deemed appropriate by their AI overlords. Why? To get jobs that aren’t a total drudge. AI only allows people in prestigious positions who have had this procedure, due to various alluded to wars and catastrophes, deemed the result of human passion by the machine intelligence.
This surgery involves cleaning up DNA by entering past lives (which are now verified scientific fact). In a previous timeline, which intercuts with the future, Gabrielle is in 1910 Paris, seemingly a happily married celebrated pianist, but drawn to a young man called Louis (George MacKay). Louis’s counterpart also exists in the future and is likewise considering having this procedure. In both timelines, Gabrielle is obsessed with the idea that something catastrophic is about to happen. Is she paranoid or is her dread justified?
The first half is slow, occasionally confusing, but to my mind never boring. The second half introduces a third version of Gabrielle and Louis, in the year 2014. Here, Louis is a desperate, potentially dangerous incel, and Gabrielle is a lonely model, though still possessed of gnawing fear that something bad is about to happen. This third timeline proves particularly riveting, as the various threads are drawn together.
Both Seydoux and MacKay give tour-de-force performances as their respective characters in their varying timelines. Seydoux is astonishing, conveying so much in tiny facial expressions. Her masterclass in understated brilliance is matched by MacKay’s unsettling mercurial shifts between timelines from desperately sad to murderously bitter and a final state that I cannot discuss for fear of spoilers.
In loosely adapting Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle, writer-director Bertrand Bonello and cinematographer Josée Deshaies switch between 1:85 and 1:33 aspect ratios. The latter emphasises the emotional claustrophobia of the future sequences; a sterile, drab world of beige and grey, with clean lines and lonely liminal spaces. In contrast, virtual reality scenes often feature more opulent imagery (including the 1910 Paris floods).
The symbolism — pigeons as harbingers of doom, a recurring doll motif which later includes androids — occasionally feels a mite obvious. But this doesn’t detract from the film’s ongoing theme exploring the horror of having one’s passions muted, leaving the audience with a moral conundrum akin to the one in A Clockwork Orange (1971). The past lives DNA cleaning in The Beast is a variant of the brainwashing depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s film.
Yes, the human race is capable of war and devastation, but AI-mandated removal of deeply felt emotions to perform a job without bias is surely nothing less than a tragedy. Is that the catastrophe Gabrielle fears rather than the more obvious answers that present themselves in their respective timelines?
Audiences that aren’t put off by the esoteric elements and stick with this will be left with much to ponder. For one thing, many will find the depiction of gnawing anxiety and paralysing existential dread immensely relatable. Contemporary concerns about dehumanising AI overreach constitute another alarmingly prescient theme, considering how some companies are now using AI to conduct interviews.
All things considered, The Beast is a visually arresting, provocative, passionate apologia for, in essence, the human condition. Again, I must stress this melancholy, enigmatic tale won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it an extraordinary experience.
One final point: Instead of end credits, the film ends with a QR code that one can scan to get the credits, plus an extra scene. This is either a clever artistic extension of the film’s themes, or a minor irritant in an otherwise excellent piece of work. I’m leaning towards the latter, as I dislike anything that encourages people to keep their phones on in cinemas.
(Originally published at Medium.)
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