Bertrand Bonello’s ambitious time- and genre-hopping film offers yet another opportunity for the actress to demonstrate her versatility, writes Yasmin Omar.
You never know what you’re going to get when you sit down to watch a Léa Seydoux film. She could be a tattoo-sleeved pothead, a sexually reawakened widow or a gun-toting assassin. She could be a misbehaving nun, a mentally unstable news anchor or a disfigured performance artist. Her latest film, Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi opus The Beast, is suitably chameleonic. Liberally adapted from Henry James’ 20th-century novella The Beast in the Jungle, it centres on Gabrielle (Seydoux), an anxious, melancholy woman who has a premonition that something terrible is lying in wait, poised to obliterate her and her loved ones. In the dystopian Paris of 2044 – where AI has taken over and left 67% of humans unemployed, and 20% stuck with brain-stultifying mechanical work – she reluctantly agrees to ‘purify’ her DNA. For Gabrielle, it means access to an intellectually stimulating job; for her AI overlords, it means a more effective, less affective, workforce.
The Beast (2023)
Gabrielle undergoes this emotion-suppressing, trauma-expunging process by lying in a bath of oily black slime and revisiting her past lives: as a high-society pianist in 1910 and a housesitting actress in 2014. Still with me? You’d be forgiven if not, The Beast is as trippy as it sounds. There are refracting images and corrective shots, recurring conversations and fragmenting realities. Objects, from pigeons to knives and dolls, pop up across the timelines in new configurations. What keeps all of the film’s sky-high concepts not only legible, but engrossing, is Seydoux; she is its grounding force, guiding us through the Dantean maze of mahogany-panelled ballrooms and neon-streaked dancefloors.
Gabrielle is a demanding role. She must be consistent enough that her character is recognisable in each decade, yet malleable enough to be believable in The Beast’s slip-sliding genres that span mannered costume drama and, by its heart-pounding climax, home-invasion horror. Seydoux, fearless performer that she is, throws herself at the part. Bonello’s camera – much like Bruno Dumont’s in France (2021) – delights in framing its star in searching close-ups that capture her fluttering microexpressions. In one remarkable 2044 scene, testing the efficacy of Gabrielle’s sentimental-purging procedure, we slowly push in on her face as she unravels before us, crawling towards her inch by inch until we’ve locked in on her terrified, tearful gaze.
The Beast (2023)
Seydoux largely moves through The Beast alone, reacting to disembodied voices and imagined threats – the 2014 section’s evisceration of green-screen storytelling, surely a cheeky nod to the actress’ own franchise work, is wryly hilarious. But her solitude is repeatedly interrupted by George MacKay’s Louis, the love of Gabrielle’s life who is pulled into, then spat out of, her orbit as the years go by. MacKay, in a role originally written for the late Gaspard Ullieul, never quite reaches Seydoux’s level; your eyes invariably drift to her when they’re together.
There’s a rigidity to him that might be chalked up to his unease speaking in recently learnt French, particularly as a British aristocrat in 1910. He’s most convincing in the 2014 instalments when (now American) Louis is a frustrated incel pouring his misogyny into venomous vlogs. MacKay’s stiffness works here, his unnatural movements fitting for a man unable to forge human connection. The film hinges on Gabrielle and Louis’s thwarted romance, which is prevented time and time again by various human and not-so-human interventions. Save for some yearning hand-acting that rivals the Mr Darcy flex, the pair’s passing-grade chemistry does not suggest a love that transcends time and space.
The Beast (2023)
Existentially far-off though it may be in parts, The Beast retains its potency through a number of searing, sociocultural commentaries. AI, contemporary cinema’s latest Big Bad, is not a nebulous evil that can be contained on a disc drive here. Instead, it’s a series of flat, bureaucratic voices (including Xavier Dolan’s!) sternly issuing commands to sublimate any signs of individuality. Saint Omer’s Guslagie Malanda, one of the few robots to appear in physical form, lists off her available services with the dispassion of a self-checkout scanner, regardless of the intimacy involved (to this being, there is no difference between puns and sex).
It’s a chilling warning – a premonition, if you will – of what awaits us should we continue on our current path of mechanisation in the name of corporate gain. For those who prefer more tangible critiques, the 2014 timeline, with its explorations of incel culture, wealth inequality and plastic-surgery pressures, will serve bountiful food for thought. The Beast has plenty of targets – and strikes them all. Like Gabrielle, who questions the merits of expelling her emotions, the film is suspicious of authority and rebukes the status quo.
The Beast (2023)
The Beast has a lot on its mind, both thematically and structurally. It’s almost as if Bonello is practising the Japanese art of kintsugi: splitting apart the narrative then fusing it back together with golden embellishments, sculpting beauty from pain to make something wholly new. The film is a poignant character study, a touching romance, a Hollywood satire, a haunting dystopia… it’s a marvel.
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