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A father and his two teenage daughters find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the Savanna has but one apex predator. A father and his two teenage daughters find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the Savanna has but one apex predator. A father and his two teenage daughters find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the Savanna has but one apex predator.

• Baltasar Kormákur
• Jaime Primak Sullivan
• Liyabuya Gongo
• Martin Munro
• Daniel Hadebe
• 610 User reviews
• 202 Critic reviews
• 54 Metascore
• 2 nominations

• Poacher Mizozi

• Dr. Nate Samuels

• Norah Samuels

• Meredith Samuels

• Martin Battles

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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia On why he did the movie, Idris Elba stated: "I come from an era where these sort of films were the norm, like high-anxiety, 'Run, chase, run, chase, look out, look behind you!' This was an opportunity for me to make a film like that. I've done thrillers before, but this was the first time it involved this cat-and-mouse aspect to it. I was really intrigued by the family dynamic, the daughters, the nature of grief, this doctor who's essentially someone that's composed and tries not to panic, found himself doing just that," Elba tells Complex about the survival thriller directed by Baltasar Kormákur. "I just love the script. I love Baltasar, the director. I wanted to work with him. He's made some really incredible survivor movies, and I just wanted to get his take on what this might be like."
• Goofs When Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) is in the lake looking for keys, he's wading almost shoulder-deep in the water. In the next shot when he is out of the water, his shirt is completely dry.

Martin Battles : Come On You Bastard

[last lines]

Martin Battles : I'm Sorry Boy

• Crazy credits After credits we here the sounds of the Savannah and lions roaring when the title comes up several slash marks appear on it followed by a lion growling
• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Beast (2022)
• Soundtracks Black Man's Cry Written & Performed by Fela Kuti (as Fela Anikulapo Kuti) Courtesy of Knitting Factory Records/Partisan Records

User reviews 610

• eric-312-417476
• Aug 20, 2022
• How long is Beast? Powered by Alexa
• August 19, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
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• South Africa
• Universal Pictures
• RVK Studios
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $36,000,000 (estimated)
• $31,846,530
• $11,575,855
• Aug 21, 2022
• $59,095,809

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 33 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital

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Review: Idris Elba, meet lion. The new thriller ‘Beast’ doesn’t beat around the bush

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Lions and poachers and snares, oh my! In the satisfyingly grisly survival thriller “Beast,” Idris Elba plays a grieving widower who drags his two teenage daughters to a South African game reserve, embarking on an emotional journey that devolves into a nightmarish tussle with Mother Nature. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun; this one has two girls and several rifles, though one of them only fires none-too-effective tranquilizer darts. The movie’s real weapon is a very large, very angry, skillfully computer-generated king of the jungle that turns out to have a major bone to pick (or crush) with the human race.

The animus is more than justified, given the ruinous state of the world in general and the ruthless poachers who’ve hunted these lions in particular. A few of those poachers come to a deservedly nasty end in the prologue, a tense nighttime set piece that establishes the human-versus-nature stakes and, no less important, a consistent, coherent visual scheme. Most of the mayhem in “Beast” is staged in lengthy, serpentine tracking shots that keep pace with the characters as they try to detect, evade and flee from a predator that might always be just a few lunges away. As his camera prowls the rugged terrain in precisely choreographed movements, director Baltasar Kormákur (working with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot) achieves a physical groundedness that makes even a digitally engineered predator seem palpably real.

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That groundedness also anchors the predictably hokey if refreshingly straightforward narrative preliminaries laid out in Ryan Engle’s screenplay (based on a story by Jaime Primak Sullivan). Nate Samuels (Elba) is a doctor, which you can bet is going to come in handy. He and his daughters — moody, photography-loving Mare (Iyana Halley) and spunky Norah (Leah Jeffries) — are visiting South Africa, the homeland of their recently deceased wife and mother. (The movie was shot on location in the country’s Northern Cape province.) They’re on a healing journey, or at least that’s the idea; family friction keeps intruding, much of it rooted in Nate’s specific failures as a husband and father.

Helping to relieve the mood is Nate’s longtime friend Martin (the invaluable Sharlto Copley, from “District 9” ). A combination game warden and wildlife whisperer, Martin is on hand to play safari guide and murmur ominous warnings about “the law of the jungle,” even as he demonstrates firsthand how harmless and cuddly the local lion prides are. You can’t blame them for the graphically mauled human corpses that suddenly turn up in a nearby village. That would be the handiwork of a much bigger, meaner lion that soon roars into the frame, trapping the group deep in the South African bush with only a stalled jeep for shelter. There’s a peculiarly monstrous, almost mutant quality to this dark-maned beast, who looks a bit like Aslan of the Dead , or perhaps Scar from “The Lion King” after a cocktail of steroids and bath salts.

That sounds ridiculous, but it turns out to be just the right amount of ridiculous for this shrewd, stripped-down late-summer diversion. Kormákur has been working his way toward this B-movie sweet spot for a while. Over a career that’s zigzagged between his native Iceland and Hollywood, he’s become a reliable disaster artist, capsizing a boat in “The Deep,” stranding two lovers at sea in “Adrift” and following mountain climbers on a snowy death march in “Everest.” The human body in extremis is his comfort zone, and here, with pouncing paws, snapping jaws and discreetly blood-gushing wounds, he sustains — and, crucially, modulates — the threat of grievous bodily harm.

It helps that the central foursome, especially Halley and Jeffries, are as likable as they are, which helps mitigate and even sell the absurdity of those moments that will have you screaming “Stay in the car, you idiot!” and “Roll up the [your choice of expletive] window!” Elba, a reliably suave man of action, shrewdly downplays here as a bumbling dad who, brawny frame and medical expertise aside, is no physical match for Pridezilla. That remains true even as things hurtle toward an inevitable mano-a-mane climax, a ludicrous if enjoyable reminder that just because you’ve seen one killer CGI lion, it doesn’t mean you’ve seen them maul.

Rating: R, for violent content, bloody images and some language Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes Playing: Starts Aug. 19 in general release

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‘Beast’ Review: Idris Elba Shows a Berserk African Lion Who’s Boss

It's not as ambitious as 'Nope,' but this tense survival story — set amid an out-of-control safari — is a lot more fun than brainier summer blockbusters.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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No animals were harmed in the making of “ Beast .” Frankly, it doesn’t look like any animals were even used in the making of “Beast,” but if you can get past the idea that the two-ton lion threatening Idris Elba and his family in the movie is a singularly frightening combination of ones and zeros, not killer instinct and claws, then “Beast” is a blast.

A white-knuckle “When Animals Attack!” movie in the tradition of “Jaws” and “Anaconda,” this big-budget, big-screen release features A-list actors — OK, actor , singular — and a director who knows what he’s doing: Icelandic ace Baltasar Kormákur, who cut his teeth on such nightmare-inducing man-against-nature films as “Everest” and “Adrift.” Here, the threat is a very big, very angry African cat, understandably agitated after a group of poachers slaughtered his pride, that has decided to kill every human that crosses his path. Seriously, the body count in this movie is off the charts.

Enter Elba, who plays single dad Nate Samuels, a tough but emotionally wounded man looking to reconnect with his two daughters, Mere (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries), by bringing them to the African savanna where he met their mother. He imagines the trip as a bonding experience and perhaps a way to patch things up after a tough year. Screenwriter Ryan Engle’s otherwise lean, suspense-focused script spends a lot of energy on their backstory, fleshing out problems with the parents’ marriage, Mom’s death by cancer and how the girls are coping with that tragedy. Dad’s in the doghouse, but punching a killer lion in the kisser is a decent way to show how much he loves his girls.

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Not all lions are ferocious, Kormákur wants to make clear, including a scene where their host, Martin (South African actor Sharlto Copley, star of “District 9”), shows how the cuddly carnivores behave toward humans they trust. Martin raised an entire pride of lions on his property from cubs, and when he approaches their territory, instead of ripping him limb from limb, the two adult males rush out to greet him, putting their (CG) paws on his shoulders and licking his face. It’s like the VFX equivalent of the “Christian the Lion” viral videos you’ve probably seen online, except, because the cats aren’t real, the scene doesn’t feel as remarkable.

It’s definitely for the best that Kormákur didn’t insist on using actual lions. If you don’t know the true story of the film “Roar” and its wildly irresponsible production, give it a Google: Director Noel Marshall tried training his big-cat cast from birth, keeping lions and such around the house for years. When it came time to shoot, he endangered his own family, as wife (and “The Birds” star) Tippi Hedren and daughter Melanie Griffith were both mauled in the making of the film.

Here, Martin takes Nate and his daughters out for a mini-safari, not realizing there’s a rogue lion on the loose. The first couple of attacks happen off-camera, as Kormákur shows the victim’s face just before a loud Dolby snarl makes the megaplex walls vibrate. Cut to black. He saves the big reveal for Nate and his daughters, who’ve exposed themselves by stepping out of the (limited) safety of Martin’s reinforced SUV. Their behavior may be risky as hell, but half the fun of the movie comes from wanting to shout at these characters to get back in the bloody car.

The movie would be pretty boring if they just huddled up there waiting for help to arrive. Instead, Kormákur commits to the R rating, piling one threat on top of another. Turns out, Martin’s an “anti-poacher” (he shoots the guys who shoot the animals on his preserve), which makes things pretty tense when the poachers from the opening scene show up, armed to the teeth — like the guerrillas from Elba’s other African-beast movie, “Beasts of No Nation.” In theory, this would mean that Martin and the lion are on the same side, although there’s no reasoning with a carnivore that feels so threatened, it will proactively attack with no intention of eating its prey.

Don’t be surprised to find a decent segment of the audience rooting for the lion — not against the Samuels clan, but against the movie’s other, more villainous characters. If a human being had suffered the same indignity this lion does in the opening scene, having its entire family slaughtered by men with guns, we’d be cheering for him to get his revenge. But Kormákur never really adopts the animal’s POV, so we’re not invited to empathize with it so much as recognize that this atypical aggression has been provoked by the poachers.

That’s where he’s lucky to have Elba, who plainly insisted on playing someone with a complicated psychology, even if all the script required was a man tough enough to take the climactic mauling “Beast” has in store for Nate. Like the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, Elba is an incredibly physical performer who instinctively comes up with little bits of business to reveal the personality of his character. The ending is ludicrous, and yet it works because of all that Elba has invested in making this protective papa convincing. That’s the beauty of “Beast”: The lion may look fake, but the stakes feel real.

Reviewed at Burbank 16, Los Angeles, Aug. 16, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 93 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release and presentation of a Will Packer Prods., RVK Studios production. Producers: Will Packer, Baltasar Kormákur, James Lopez. Executive producers: Bernard Bellew, Jaime Primak Sullivan.
• Crew: Director: Baltasar Kormákur. Screenplay: Ryan Engle; story: Jaime Primak Sullivan. Camera: Philippe Rousselot. Editor: Jay Rabinowitz. Editor: Steven Price.
• With: Idris Elba, Sharlto Copley, Iyana Halley, Leah Jeffries.

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'Beast' review: Good dad Idris Elba battles ticked-off CGI lion for a tolerable mane event

Rule of the movie jungle: It’s harmful to one’s health to square up with a vengeful and ridiculously dangerous lion – computer-generated image or real – even if you’re Idris Elba .

Elba’s signature cool gets tossed around a bit, though the British actor does get to throw haymakers at a roaring creature in the mane event of “Beast” (★★½ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday). The over-the-top survival thriller definitely fits into the aesthetic of Hollywood’s August burn-off period, where bad (and so-bad-they’re-good) movies reign, though Elba’s charisma goes a long way in terms of enjoyability as do some hair-raising animal attacks.

Directed by Baltasar Kormákur (“ Everest ,” “2 Guns”), the film begins with recently widowed Nate Samuels (Elba) taking his teenage daughters Mare (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries) on a trip to the South African savanna where Nate met their mom. The three are still reeling following her death from cancer when they meet up with old friend Martin (Sharlto Copley), a wildlife biologist who shows the visitors around his reserve – including a family of lions.

'Beast': Idris Elba has Leonardo DiCaprio to thank for his 'realistic' lion fight

Another pride, however, was just slaughtered by poachers, all except for one huge male lion that escaped. Ticked off and out for blood – any human’s will do – the rogue beast attacks the group, savagely injuring Martin and turning their van into the one thing keeping them alive. It’s not even good at that, as the lion pushes the vehicle and comes flying through the window, and Nate fights to keep everyone safe from this monster.

“Beast” is lean and mean at 93 minutes, but still the movie takes its time to get to the good stuff. Once the vicious lion starts stalking its prey – and claustrophobic attacks lead to an epic face-off between man and nature – the film finds its way and offers up some decent jump scares before the story begins to dip toward far-fetched fantasy. You will have to endure some forgettable B-movie dialogue: “We’re in his territory now,” Copley somehow says with a straight face as the movie’s four-legged villain makes his presence felt.

For a digital critter, the main lion’s not bad and feels real, especially in the night scenes where it comes off as a horror villain on a bloody paw-ful killing spree. (Is there enough CGI lion? Never.) Logic takes a nosedive later on, as the lion becomes an obsessive combination of Cujo, the Terminator and the shark from “Jaws.” What’s interesting, be it a conscious choice or a budgetary one, is that while the primary antagonist is a ripping, biting, tearing terror on people, the camera looks away when there’s creature-on-creature carnage – a decision that plays well for the animal lovers in the audience.

Knuckles up: Why Idris Elba's furious critter is the very best thing about 'Sonic the Hedgehog 2'

But “Beast” tends to force human emotion: The narrative hints at a cultural exploration around Nate’s late wife and her village but it’s fleeting. Plus, when you have children in danger, you don’t have to do a lot to imagine a guy going into super-dad mode, and the film leans conveniently with its story choices. (People tend to be wounded in the path of an out-of-control big cat, so good thing Nate’s a doctor!)

It isn’t Elba’s “Sharknado” but also not exactly his “Out of Africa,” so just enjoy this late-summer flick for what it does well: a primal fight between man and very mad lion that brings unhinged beauty to a rousing “Beast.”

From 'Top Gun' to 'Nope': 10 magical movie moments we can't stop talking about this summer

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‘beast’ review: idris elba tangles with the king of the jungle in tense but silly survival thriller.

Sharlto Copley also stars in Baltasar Kormákur's nightmare safari in which a desperate father is driven to protect his daughters from a vengeful lion.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Beast wants to have it both ways. Ryan Engle’s script, from a story by Jaime Primak Sullivan, loads up on gore and distressingly close calls amped up with effective jump scares. But it’s not content to give us dumb hair-raising fun; it also aims to move us with the tender feelings and frictions of a family ruptured by tragedy. What’s more, it asks us to accept a citified guy who appears never before to have handled a rifle instantly becoming Indiana Jones.

It’s a testament to the charisma and natural gravitas of Elba that we even halfway buy Dr. Nate Samuels as he dodges the massive rogue male lion, at one point simultaneously stopping a deadly boomslang snake mid-strike. When he’s wading around in crocodile-infested waters, I kept expecting him to punch one of those leathery mothers in the mouth, Lara Croft-style.

A tense prologue shows poachers under the cloak of night wrapping up a successful hunt, during which they have killed a pride of lions, whose teeth, claws and bones fetch big money on the black market. Only the patriarch of the pride eludes them, its paw prints indicating its mighty size. A handful of men stay behind to kill the creature before it comes after them. But its stealth in the tall grass proves too much for them.

Kormákur follows the old rule of holding off on showing the monster, seen only in the briefest flash as it leaps out of the darkness onto an unfortunate poacher.

Recently widowed Dr. Nate arrives with his 18-year-old daughter Mere (Iyana Halley) and her 13-year-old sister Norah (Leah Jeffries) at a remote location deep in the South African bushland, met there by family friend Martin ( Sharlto Copley ), a wildlife expert who manages the nature reserve.

Nate first met his wife there through Martin, and the trip to some degree has been planned to bridge the distance that’s opened up between him and Mere since her mother’s death. The couple had mutually agreed to separate, and Mere blames her dad for not being there as her mother’s health declined. In routine fashion, Nate also beats himself up for not being a sharp enough doctor to spot the cancer and stop it in its tracks.

But when Martin spots what appears to be a bullet wound in the paw of one of the females, he insists they stop by a local village to investigate. The fresh carnage they find there is alarming evidence of a lion behaving abnormally, entering a populated settlement and indiscriminately killing without eating its prey. A mountain in their path blocks the jeep’s radio signal, leaving the group with minimal protection when the grieving lion charges at them.

Unlike, say, Disney’s unnecessary live-action remake of The Lion King , which just seemed like another form of animation, minus the heart, the CG lion here is a fearsome, photo-realistic creature. The relentlessness with which it pounds the jeep, crashing through windows and swiping at the trembling family inside, makes for some pulse-pounding sequences.

Halley and Jeffries are terrific as young women suddenly given something more legitimate to complain about than the lack of WiFi or cell reception. And the script gives them just enough courage and resourcefulness to have a hand in the family’s survival, without veering into ridiculousness. That’s not always the case with Nate, who is forced to take charge when Martin is immobilized by a severe mauling. Suspension of disbelief is required more than once, notably when the lion is only inches away from Nate but appears to have no sense of smell. Maybe its nose got damaged while pulverizing the jeep’s windscreen?

As man vs. beast stories go, this one is neither the best nor the worst. Steven Price’s score keeps the tension high, and Elba and Copley are good enough actors to deliver even the most pedestrian dialogue with conviction. It also helps that the movie runs a tight 90 minutes. Beast is no Jaws , but it’s no Jaws: The Revenge , either.

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Beast plays like bleak poetry, unfurling its psychological thrills while guided by its captivating leads and mesmerizing, visceral visuals.

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Beast review – a dangerous liaison to get your teeth into

Fairytale meets psycho thriller as rising stars Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn find that opposites attract

A fter the whimsy of last week’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and the real-life dramas of 2017’s Another Mother’s Son , the Channel Islands become home to something altogether more eerie in this Jersey-set debut feature from writer-director Michael Pearce. Charting a turbulent relationship between a cloistered young woman and the vagabond man who turns her world upside down, Pearce’s increasingly intense psychological thriller deftly overturns expectations as it dances between timeless fable, modern romance and murder mystery. Superb central performances from rising stars Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn provide the visceral spark that fires the story – a game of psychological cat and mouse in which desire and danger, innocence and guilt, are intriguingly intertwined.

Buckley is on phosphorescent form as flame-haired islander Moll, a twentysomething misfit who is still firmly under the thumb of her domineering mother. While her siblings have long since spread their wings, Moll remains trapped within the family home, helping to care for her ageing father, rigidly controlled by her choir-mistress mum, Hilary (Geraldine James). When Moll meets gun-toting woodsman Pascal (Flynn), his Heathcliff-like charms awaken passionate responses, encouraging Moll to break away from her suffocating home life.

Meanwhile, a spate of killings has cast a cloud over this picturesque isle, with the finger of suspicion pointing toward Pascal. Yet Moll has secrets of her own, is haunted by the spectre of a violent childhood assault, and the whispered warning that “Moll’s a wild one…”

Although the narrative may contain a distant echo of a grisly real-life case from the 1960s, Beast owes a greater debt to the traditions of the fairytale, and is cut from the same inspirational cloth as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread , with a touch of the stranded desperation of Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago . The title, which is deliberately ambiguous, seems to allude to Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s beloved Beauty and the Beast , but there’s also a whiff of Walerian Borowczyk’s controversially erotic (and once-banned) La Bête .

Certainly, there’s a subversive European flavour to Pearce’s ambitious Brit-pic that keeps us guessing about its characters’ motives as it slides between genres (melodrama, crime thriller, beastly chiller) with ease. Tonally, I was reminded at times of François Ozon’s deeply unsettling Regarde la mer , with its sharp juxtaposition of sensual island sunshine and murderously dark deception.

Crucially, Pearce, who made a splash with shorts such as Rite and Keeping Up With the Joneses, steers clear of identifying any specific character as the “Beast” of the title – of which there may be more than one. Like Rachel Weisz’s anti-heroine in Roger Michell’s recent remake of My Cousin Rachel , Flynn plays Pascal’s guilt or innocence close to his chest, conjuring an enigma who simultaneously attracts and repels. Yet Buckley’s Moll is just as slippery, seeing a kindred spirit in her outcast lover, finding parallels with her past in his predicament. (At one point, Moll compares herself to a captive killer whale – smiling but deranged.) “You’re wounded,” says Pascal pointedly on their first meeting. “I can fix that.” Perhaps this is why she defends him even in the face of supposedly damning evidence. Or maybe she’s just blinded by passion, unable to see her lover for what he really is.

While Beast pulses with sweeping primal themes, it’s the details that ensure that it gets its claws into an audience. An early scene in which Moll is casually sidelined at her own birthday party speaks volumes about her family history and the yoke under which she now struggles. Later, she digs her muddy nails into the family sofa – a powerful image of lusty defiance. As Hilary, Geraldine James is impressively oppressive, but there’s a hint of terror behind her authoritarian manner. She may be a scary mum, but Hilary is also clearly frightened of her daughter – of what she might do, what she might become.

Contrasting the breathtaking vistas of the Jersey exteriors with the conservative confines of Moll’s home-life interiors (the latter were shot in Surrey), Pearce and cinematographer Benjamin Kračun conjure an archetypal landscape in which disparate worlds collide. As Moll moves from one environment to the other, so the form of the film itself shifts, with elegantly orchestrated compositions giving way to more free-form, handheld sequences. The result is a smart and sinewy psychodrama that maintains a delicate balance between its warring elements right through to the final frames.

The furniture on this review was amended on 29 April 2018 to correct a description of Irish actor Jessie Buckley as British.

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Screen Rant

The beast review: the world is always ending in this sweeping sci-fi romance.

A centuries-spanning romantic odyssey that is equal parts strange sci-fi and melodrama, Bertrand Bonello's The Beast is unclassifiable and refreshing.

• The Beast examines past lives' influence on the present, focusing on a central pair's history.
• The film mixes genres excitingly, with horror constantly looming in each story.
• The fear depicted in The Beast reflects contemporary anxieties, emphasizing the importance of feeling over forgetting.

The Beast is an apt title for a film that often feels untamable. A centuries-spanning romantic odyssey that is equal parts strange sci-fi and high melodrama, Bertrand Bonello's film is unclassifiable, wild, and refreshing. The French director examines how the past never stays in the past and how the baggage we attempt to rid ourselves of from moment to moment, or even from life to life, will inevitably rear its oft-ugly head.

The year is 2044: artificial intelligence controls all facets of a stoic society as humans routinely “erase” their feelings. Hoping to eliminate pain caused by their past-life romances, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) continually falls in love with different incarnations of Louis (George MacKay).

• Though spanning centuries, The Beast brings modern fears into the story
• Léa Seydoux and George MacKay are excellent
• The Beast knows how to balance its sci-fi and romance
• The film lovingly highlights the importance of feelings and not forgetting

The Beast Moves Through Time To Unveil The Past Lives Of Its Central Pair

How they influence the present is just as important.

In 2044, Gabrielle ( Léa Seydoux ) is trying to rid herself of that baggage through a procedure that purifies a person's DNA, purging the patient of leftover emotions from their past lives. This procedure will rid her of these past traumas that cause Gabrielle to feel a lingering sense of doom in the present day. What that doom entails remains a mystery, but she's not the only one hoping to temper feelings of disquiet.

Gabrielle encounters Louis (George MacKay) while prepping for the procedures, and she is drawn to the man with an air of familiarity about him. When she finally dives into her past lives, we see her encounter different versions of Louis that change the course of her various lives. First, the pair meet in Belle-Époque-era Paris. In another life, Louis is an incel stalking Gabrielle as she house-sits a Los Angeles mansion while working as an actress.

The Beast Plays With Genre In Increasingly Exciting Ways

But the inevitability of horror lies around every corner.

In all of these lives, Gabrielle is near fatalistic in her conviction that some bad thing will befall her. The Beast 's real terror, though, comes from actualizing this feeling in its various tales. Whispers of Paris flooding follow Gabrielle and Louis in the early 20th century. Misogyny and violence hover over Gabrielle's life in 2014 Los Angeles. The threat of control follows her everywhere in 2044. The film's score and sound design are unsettling as they mimic or even impact what's happening onscreen.

All of these disparate elements feel like they shouldn't work together, but it's their discordant qualities that allow The Beast to coalesce into a symphony of anxiety.

Tight string arrangements follow Gabrielle as she's stalked through the Los Angeles mansion. Sweeping orchestral music accompanies Louis and Gabrielle's outings in Paris and deep synths serve as a backdrop for the film's minimalist future. All of these disparate elements feel like they shouldn't work together, but it's their discordant qualities that allow The Beast to coalesce into a symphony of anxiety.

In The Beast, The Apocalypse Is A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The end is just the beginning.

The world is always ending in The Beast, and it's easy to see our own world reflected in the ones portrayed by Bonello. Seydoux's dialed-in performance — detached but all too aware — ensures that we are never too comfortable. Gabrielle's anxieties are much like our own — sea levels rising, political unrest, the erosion of the truth and empathy. Ironic detachment is the mode of our times, but when the irony disappears and all that remains is indifference, the world starts to feel a lot like the future in The Beast .

Even the film itself begins with detachment personified. In 2014, Gabrielle films a scene for what appears to be a horror movie, but in place of the empty house and horrifying monster, the floor and background are green screen. The director asks if she can be afraid of something that isn't really there. Gabrielle says she can. The fear we create in our heads is just as real as the fear created by a world in disarray. Those fears can manifest in people, in world-ending events, or in ideologies.

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By the end, The Beast knows that this fear — Gabrielle's and our own — is not something that can be purged. It is this fear that allows Gabrielle to be sincere, to search for meaning in a world where it is being sucked out of the air. In 2044, Artificial Intelligence rules the world after an unspecified catastrophe.

This catastrophe isn't the one Gabrielle is afraid of, but it is one that perhaps influenced her fear of the future. Our minds are always searching for something to be afraid of. Sometimes we need that fear. Bonello posits that, even in fear, feeling is more important than forgetting, and every little death is a door to another future.

The Beast opens in select theaters on Friday, April 5, expanding to more theaters on April 12.

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Critic’s pick

‘The Beast’ Review: Master of Puppets

Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers in three different eras, is an audacious sci-fi romance.

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By Beatrice Loayza

Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” is an audacious interdimensional romance, techno-thriller and Los Angeles noir rolled up in one. This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.

The prologue shows a green-screen shoot in which Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) takes directions from a presence off camera and, with expert professionalism, braces herself to confront an imaginary monster. The effect is uncanny, wryly funny, weirdly sensual and very sad. Bonello sustains this unsettling tone throughout the film, although the individual parts are less consistent. This is the toll of shifting time periods, from a costume drama to a modern mockery of incel culture.

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With computer-generated imagery, any opponent — and any era — can materialize in the background. What does this mean for actors? The feeling that great forces move us like puppets runs through Bonello’s genre-bending work (in his 2017 film, “ Nocturama ,” a gang of teenage terrorists hide in a shopping mall and see themselves reflected in the consumerist sprawl).

“The Beast” follows Gabrielle and Louis (George MacKay), who are lovers, in three incarnations, through three timelines: Paris circa 1910, when the city flooded; Los Angeles in the 2010s; and Paris in 2044, a near-future in which artificial intelligence has almost overtaken the work force.

In 2044, Gabrielle is struggling to get a job. A disembodied voice at an eerily vacant employment agency tells her that her emotions make her unsuited to work, and a purification process that scrubs people of their pesky feelings is recommended. “All of them?” Gabrielle asks nervously. She is a pianist and an actor in earlier timelines, so she values her capacity to be moved and react authentically.

Gabrielle opts for a less intrusive process, envisioned as a bath in black goo and a needle prick in the ear, which involves scanning her past lives to reckon with the source of her sorrows.

Bonello was loosely inspired by “The Beast in the Jungle,” a Henry James novella about a man who is convinced his life will be defined by tragedy. The film’s early, belle epoque strand veers closest to this drama, with Gabrielle and Louis in an unconsummated affair, engaging in breathy conversations inflected with philosophy. In Los Angeles, Gabrielle is house-sitting in a glass mansion; Louis, an incel modeled after Elliot Rodger , fixates on her.

The Los Angeles section has the vibe of a surveillance-style slasher flick. Gabrielle’s laptop is infected by a virus that spawns dozens of nasty pop-ups, including one with a fortune teller. All the film’s talk about dreams and the people who exist within them add to this ambient menace.

Bonello has never been shy about showcasing his influences. Here, David Lynch is a lodestar. In Los Angeles, Gabrielle’s blond bob recalls Naomi Watts in “Mulholland Drive,” and she also sheds a tear while listening to a Roy Orbison cover. Then there’s the ending, a red-curtain climax that lands on a screeching revelation not unlike the finale of “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

The horror that hits in the final moments of “The Beast” tears open a fresh wound. What does the future hold if everything can be determined by the past? If new films are rehashes of old ones? If we’re condemned to the traumas of our previous lives? The film connects this to the emergence of artificial intelligence, which imitates but never truly creates. “Fulfillment lies in the lack of passion,” Louis tells Gabrielle. Is fulfillment what lies ahead?

The Beast Not Rated. In French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes. In theaters.

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The Beast review: a gonzo sci-fi movie with a touch of David Lynch

“The full galaxy-brain ambition of The Beast could not be anticipated.”

• Wildly ambitious
• Deeply unnerving
• Two strong performances
• Some awkward stretches

For Bertrand Bonello, movies are like rubber bands: They’re meant to be stretched as far as they’ll go. The Beast , the French writer-director’s latest, spans eras, continents, languages, and genres. It is, at minimum, three movies in one, with enough preoccupations for many more still. Bonello loves to collapse time and space. His rapturous House of Pleasures used anachronistic pop and a parting, divisive flash-forward to connect one century’s sex work to another’s, while his Zombi Child possessed a modern Parisian coming-of-age drama with the spirit of midcentury Haitian horror. Conceptually speaking, those were but preludes to the audacious pastiche he’s made this time. The full galaxy-brain ambition of The Beast could not be anticipated.

As it turns out, an inability to anticipate is what Bonello is driving at here, at least in part. Unease about a future that is unknown certainly haunts Gabrielle, his chronologically trifurcated heroine, played by French movie star and former Bond girl Léa Seydoux. “Can you get scared by something that’s not actually here?” a filmmaker asks her during an acting audition. Standing against a wall fully draped in green screen, he’s talking about the ability to convincingly react to nothing — an all-too-necessary skillset for performers of the 21st century. For Gabrielle, this is not a big ask. She has, after all, spent multiple lifetimes gripped by fear of something that’s not actually there. That’s the beast of the title, though psychologists know it by a different name.

The movie opens on a soundstage, a backdrop of green, in what turns out to be a flashback of sorts. The present tense of The Beast is the future — specifically, a serenely dystopian 2044 controlled by AI and defined by a willful movement toward dimming emotion. Bonello’s conception of this bleak world is suggestively sparse: bare rooms shrouded in darkness, eerily depopulated streets, fashion and interior design not easily identified by decade. Less can be more when you’re trying to envision tomorrow on a budget; as a bonus, the black-box minimalism and lack of technological detail guarantee that The Beast won’t look hopelessly outdated six months from now.

Guided by a disembodied computer overlord voiced by fellow filmmaker Xavier Dolan — an element that recalls Alphaville , a gold standard for resourcefully making now feel like later — Gabrielle submits to “purification.” This faintly Lacuna Inc-like therapy allows patients to access memories of past lives to scrub their very DNA of bad feelings. Through the process, Gabrielle discovers her secret connection to a handsome stranger she’s just met, Louis ( 1917 ’s George MacKay, in a part originally intended for Bonello’s late St. Laurent star Gaspard Ulliel). It turns out the two really met in another lifetime, in the France of 1910, when she was a married musician and he a dashing suitor. Their tentative courtship, creeping around the edges of indiscretion, allows Bonello to do his own version of Edith Wharton — a miniature costume drama elegantly shot on 35mm.

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The dialogue during these terrific scenes alternates between French and English, sometimes almost as a means of inflection, reflecting subtle shifts in the seductive charge between the two. Some of it is borrowed from the unlikely source material: the 1903 Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle , about a man caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy, so blinded by his certainty that misfortune awaits him that he fails to really live (which is, of course, the misfortune he fears). To say that this is a loose adaptation would be to put it lightly; more than just flipping the gender of the afflicted character, Bonello expands the story outward into a curious science fiction triptych. But its tragedy remains visible through the metaphysical layers. Much of it rests on Seydoux, the rare modern movie star with a timeless glamour, equally at home in an opera house of the early 1900s and a bumping nightclub of the debased 2010s.

Speaking of which, The Beast eventually leaps into the Los Angeles of 2014, when Gabrielle is now an aspiring actress. Louis, meanwhile, has been reborn as an embittered virgin; his resentment is like an echo of the rejection he experienced a century earlier across the ocean. Bonello models this new version of the character on Elliot Rodger, the mass shooter who killed six people during a rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara. MacKay, delivering a close imitation of that real-life killer’s misogynistic YouTube musings, chillingly taps into the entitlement and self-pity of incel martyrdom. What’s spooky-good about the performance is how you can still see glimmers of the romantic MacKay plays in the turn-of-the-century scenes. He creates a continuity of character across two very different specimens of blue-balls bachelorhood.

Marked by a few stilted bit performances and a hypnotically repetitive rhythm, this near-contemporary stretch of the movie — a trance stalker thriller in the City of Angels — is at once awkward and nightmarish. The two qualities are perhaps related, even inextricable. Does it say something about the unreal nature of modern life that the scenes closest to “present day” are the least convincing? Bonello’s barely period-piece vision of a Hollywood of casting calls, callous nightlife, and video-call psychics suggests a sentence translated from English to French and then back again. While so much fiction paints the early 20th century as an age of repression, Bonello intriguingly upends convention by depicting the world of the past as more emotionally open than the present.

Just as motifs repeat across the film’s timelines — dolls, pigeons, and fortune tellers make multiple appearances — there’s a déjà vu quality to much of The Beast itself. Befitting its laptop-age flourishes, it sometimes suggests a gonzo supercut, as if Bonello were filtering past-lives reveries of the past like Cloud Atlas , The Fountain , and 2046 through the velvet dread of David Lynch . (The ending, when a waltz in a red room shatters into screaming distress, is deeply Twin Peaks- coded.) All the same, Bonello’s way with unnerving atmosphere is his own. The movie’s climax, a fated reunion of estranged kindred spirits that plays out in a vulnerable glass house on the edge of showbiz, is like a shuddering psychic aftershock of the director’s masterpiece, Nocturama . Here, as in that terrorists-in-Paris provocation, Bonello warps time, turning the suspenseful final scenes into a buffering, skipping glitch in the feed.

“It’s very inventive, but it’s hard to find the emotion in it,” someone says of a piece of music early on. For some, that may be true of The Beast , too: It’s easier to admire the structural gambit of the film   — to marvel at the scope of its genre-blending, century-jumping architecture — than to be drawn into its melodrama. But maybe that’s just a reflection of the hesitancy at the heart of the story. After 150 years, will these two finally become one? Or are they destined to keep passing each other like ships in the night? For all Gabrielle’s odyssey of therapeutic remembrance recalls a library of reincarnation romances, Bonello’s real subject isn’t love but the ways we psychologically wall ourselves off from it. Passion fades with time. It’s our defense mechanisms and the anxieties undergirding them that are truly built to last.

The Beast opens in select theaters Friday, April 5. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his  Authory page .

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Movie Reviews

'the beast' jumps from 1910, to 2014, to 2044, tracking fear through the ages.

Justin Chang

Gabrielle and Louis (Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) meet in 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles and again in 2044 in The Beast . Carole Bethuel/Kinology hide caption

Gabrielle and Louis (Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) meet in 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles and again in 2044 in The Beast .

There's no easy way to sum up the work of the brilliant and maddening French writer-director Bertrand Bonello. In recent years, he's made a zombie thriller rooted in Haitian voodoo lore and an unconventional biopic of Yves Saint-Laurent. His most controversial title, Nocturama , is a hangout movie about a group of French youth carrying out terrorist attacks around Paris. Bonello's films have a unique way of blurring the intellectual and the aesthetic: Their gorgeous surfaces are often loaded with troubling and provocative ideas.

His latest movie is called The Beast , and it's one of the best and least classifiable things he's ever done. It's a wildly original adaptation of the 1903 Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle , about a man who dwells in a constant state of fear.

James' story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of being too cautious, of not embracing life and love to the fullest. Bonello takes this premise and spins it in several unexpected directions. First, he recasts the hesitant protagonist as a woman, named Gabrielle, played by the wonderful Léa Seydoux. Then he positions her in three different stories, set in three time frames, and suffused with elements of horror, mystery and science fiction. It's easier to follow than it sounds: Even when it's not entirely clear where or when we are, Bonello's filmmaking is so hypnotic, and Seydoux's performance so subtly mesmerizing, that you can't help getting caught up in the flow.

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The first story is the one that most closely resembles the novella. It's 1910, and Gabrielle is a renowned pianist who has a run-in at a Paris salon with a gentleman named Louis, played by the English actor George MacKay. In a setup that evokes the confounding 1961 classic Last Year at Marienbad , Gabrielle and Louis seem to vaguely recall having met before. There's a clear attraction between them, but Gabrielle, who's married, resists pursuing it. Her restraint will cost her in a climax that coincides with a real-life Parisian catastrophe, the Great Flood of 1910.

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The second story takes place in Los Angeles in 2014, and has some of the eerie menace of David Lynch 's masterpiece Mulholland Dr. Gabrielle is now an aspiring model and actor who's been housesitting for a wealthy Angeleno. Rattled by a violent earthquake one morning, she steps outside and runs into Louis, who's now a deeply disturbed incel who's been posting misogynist video rants online.

MacKay is utterly terrifying as this Louis, who's modeled on a man who killed six people in 2014 in Isla Vista, Calif. What makes this second segment so chilling is that, unlike in the novella, the protagonist's fear is not unfounded. The beast stalking Gabrielle is all too real.

The third story is the most elusive and intriguing. It's set in 2044, when the world is run by AI. Gabrielle plays a human who, to join the work force, must undergo a process that will rid her of her emotions. This segment, with its shades of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , explains the framework of the entire movie: It turns out that the 1910 and 2014 sections are remnants of Gabrielle's past lives, now being purged from her subconscious.

Bonello doesn't tell the stories one at a time; he jumps around and among them. He's tracking the sources of human alienation and anxiety through the ages, asking why, in every era, we find ways to disengage from life and the people around us. The movie is especially insightful about how technology evolves. Each chapter features an artificial human companion of sorts: a line of baby dolls in 1910, a talking doll in 2014, a robot friend in 2044. Along the way, Bonello also asks questions about the future of movies, a medium so overrun with CGI that it's become harder to tell what's real from what isn't.

As grim as The Beast sounds, it isn't entirely pessimistic about the state of the world. I left the movie feeling disturbed but also enthralled, and strangely reassured by Seydoux's presence in all three stories. The futuristic Gabrielle may have to divest herself of her feelings, but Seydoux's emotions are always within reach. The more unreal her surroundings become, the more hauntingly human her performance feels.

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The launching pad for Bertrand Bonello ’s new picture “The Beast” (“La Bete”) is a 1903 short story by Henry James called “The Beast in the Jungle.” Seen by some James scholars as an autobiographical expression of rue for a life of inaction, it treats the case of John Marcher, who confides in his acquaintance May Bartram that he lives in fear of an unnamable catastrophe that could upend his life, and the life of anyone close to him. She claims to get what he’s talking about.

“‘You mean you feel how my obsession — poor old thing — may correspond to some possible reality?’

‘To some possible reality.’

‘Then you will watch with me?’”

And so May does. And Marcher’s fear translates into a passivity that compels him to hold May at arm’s length for the rest of his life. At the end of the story, he mourns a love he never allowed himself to have and understands that the catastrophe was his own fear.

In Bonello’s film, the fear belongs to the popular Parisian concert pianist Gabrielle Monnier ( Lea Seydoux ), who, around the time of the great 1910 flood of France’s City of Lights, confesses this fear to Louis ( George MacKay ), a young Englishman with whom she soon begins a tentative liaison. But the trouble they encounter has nothing to do with Gabrielle’s reticence to enter into a romantic relationship with Louis—although that does exist.

Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far. A vision of three (actually four) nightmare times, all of them in the same vexed world.

The cataclysms that fall upon Gabrielle—played by a superbly controlled and often heartbreaking Lea Seydoux—aren’t spiritual or conceptual (well, of course, at first, they are), they’re “real,” or Real. They’re corporeal/physical, or simulations of the corporeal physical. And they’re unavoidable. Boy oh boy can you not stop what’s coming. Close that browser window, rewind that video, press mute on the sound system, reset the house alarm, none of it will do you any good. Not even an alteration in the fabric of reality itself—and this seems to occur at least a half dozen times in the picture—will stave off horror. The beast isn’t in the jungle, it’s in the house, and it’s in the air we can only barely breathe when the movie gets to 2044. It is in us; it is us.

Sounds cheerful, right? Well, what can I tell you? Bonello has a way of throwing us into an enhanced vision of the degrading noise of contemporary life that’s all the more engaging for being so even-handed and deliberate. I mentioned three timelines that are actually four—the movie is framed, kind of, by a green-screen session in which Seydoux, possibly playing Gabrielle, possibly playing herself, is coached through paces for a scene in which she actually apprehends “the beast” and lets out a blood-curdling scream. The image degenerates into a gorgeous abstract mural of pixels. Digitization is here both a source of ravishing sights and sounds and an Excedrin headache of aural and visual glitch. The movie then bounces through three time periods: 1910, 2044—where Gabrielle’s character seeks to abolish her reincarnation torment through a “DNA purge”—and most terrifyingly, 2014, wherein “Gabby” is housesitting in L.A. and targeted by the angry incel version of MacKay’s Louis—Louis Lewansky, who’s 30 and never been with a woman despite his “magnificence,” and who’s now getting ready to avenge himself.

Dolls are a recurring motif here—there are old-fashioned ones made for fans of the pianist Gabby, and unhelpful talking doll in the Hollywood house, and a walking, talking A.I. helper (played by Guslagie Malanda , as impressive here in a relatively small role as she was in the lead of 2022’s “ Saint Omer ”). An electrical fire figures in the 1910 sequence; a malware attack on a laptop is one of the insane blowups in the 2014 scenario. There are bits and pieces here that feel Lynchian, especially in the Los Angeles scenes, during which Gabrielle is fascinated/repulsed by a TV singing contest show that feels like it might have sprung full blown from the creator of “Twin Peaks.” Then there’s the fact that the love song recurring throughout shows up at the very end, sung in its original version by, well Roy Orbison. But unlike Lynch, Bonello has a decidedly un-obscure point to make. Mainly about how the pursuit of the authentic in life is invariably thwarted by roadblocks of humanity’s own making. (Although one supposes that the eighth episode of the 2018 “Twin Peaks” season treated that theme in a relatively unambiguous way.)

“There must be beautiful things in this chaos,” Gabrielle tries to reassure the movie’s scariest version of Louis at one point. Bonello, and this movie’s, greatest dread is that someday a terrible order will emerge, one that will make whatever beauty remains disappear. 

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Beast (2024)

146 minutes

Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle

George MacKay as Louis

Kester Lovelace as Tom

Julia Faure as Sophie

Guslagie Malanda as Poupée Kelly

Dasha Nekrasova as Dakota

Martin Scali as Georges

Elina Löwensohn as La voyante

Marta Hoskins as Gina

Félicien Pinot as Augustin

Laurent Lacotte as L'architecte

Xavier Dolan as Interviewer (voice)

• Bertrand Bonello
• Guillaume Bréaud

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‘The Beast’ review: In 2044, AI takes care of business, while Léa Seydoux takes care of the movie

T ruly this is the month for future shock — darkly compelling visions of a near-future that humankind can only interpret as a rejection letter, or a comeuppance for its determined lack of disaster prevention and preparedness.

The narratively straightforward “Civil War” has some far-out company, in other words. Now in limited theatrical release, co-writer-director Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” imagines a world 20 years hence. Climate change, and presumed corporate and political resistance to changing with it, have led to ruinous air quality, unlivable for humans without enormous masks and sealed buglike visors. Human unemployment hovers around 67%, thanks to the workforce dominance of artificial intelligence. The world has been saved by AI, we’re told in passing, and is run with reliable calm by humanoid dolls calling the shots, unburdened by the pesky brain chemistry and volatility of human “affects.”

In the 2044 Paris sequences of “The Beast,” the protagonist, Gabrielle — one of three Gabrielles we come to know, two of them past incarnations from 1910 and 2014 — seeks something more fulfilling than simple (and by the movie, undefined) drudgery work, the kind of thing humans used to believe AI would handle. Gabrielle’s emotions prevent her viability for better-paying jobs. She faces a decision point: Should she undergo “purification,” a zeroing-out of the psychic residue of her past lives? Or is a life of real feeling, even if surrounded by a sea of neutral faces and frictionless blank spirits, the better option?

In her previous selves Gabrielle was a celebrated pianist in the time of the momentous Paris flood (1910), then a struggling actress adrift in Los Angeles (2014). In each of the film’s three intertwined eras, her passionate artist’s heart belongs to the same man, Louis (George MacKay). Like Gabrielle, he undergoes wholesale personality and destiny makeovers in each time frame. Yet a pervasive fear of imminent catastrophe prevents Gabrielle from seizing the day, and the life she truly wants. She’s the gender-switched equivalent to the male character of the screenplay’s origin, the 1903 Henry James novella “The Beast in the Jungle,” though Bonello and co-writers Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit pile their own fabulations atop fabulations, with imaginative impunity.

It all might’ve sunk under the weight of itself — if not for Léa Seydoux. No one in contemporary film expresses so much with eyes, voice, silence, small talk, whatever the moment requires, while repressing or hinting at so much more. Seydoux makes this trio of Gabrielles specific, droll and very moving, even when “The Beast” wanders a bit, or pulls from its various literary and cinematic influences — a little David Lynch, a little David Fincher, a lot of slightly curdled romanticism — to occasionally uncertain effect. MacKay’s good; Seydoux is excellent.

Bonello treats his layer cake of a movie as an occasion for a layering of genres. I found the 2014 L.A. narrative the least interesting, though certainly tension-building, since MacKay’s 2014 Louis is modeled after serial killer Elliot Rodger. For roughly 40 minutes of “The Beast,” we’re watching a virtual stand-alone thriller, with Gabrielle housesitting in a swank, cold glass domicile just begging for voyeurs, or worse. The dread that has dogged past versions of Gabrielle becomes manifest here, as MacKay’s incel stalker directs his lonely rage on women everywhere, anywhere.

This unbalances the movie, I think. And yet “The Beast” is an elegant cinematic achievement. Its devotion to the untamed territory of the human heart, its artfully discombobulating time and locale shifts, the shifting personae handled with marvelous fluidity by Seydoux; it takes you somewhere, and more than one somewhere.

“AI has become responsible and fair,” the 2044 Gabrielle is told by her unseen job interviewer, not human. Then, he adds: “And so human .” “The Beast” doesn’t need much in the way of digital imagery to create a strange new world; it’s enough to make Gabrielle audition for a phone commercial in a green-screen sound stage at the beginning (and later), where she pretends to see things she can only imagine. Later, Seydoux’s wearily reincarnated Gabrielle wanders the near-empty streets of the formerly beguiling City of Light, with only a stray deer for company. The sight is grimly amusing: tragicomedy. So is the telltale throwaway line early on, referencing Gabrielle’s childhood in America and her family’s abrupt return to France.

Why flee? Two words, which happen to be the title of the Alex Garland movie also in theaters: civil war.

Is our civic, political and democratic collapse as dead certain as the movies are making it right now?

'THE BEAST'

(In French and English with English subtitles)

3 stars (out of 4)

No MPA rating (violence, some nudity, language)

Running time: 2:26

How to watch: Now in theaters

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