From The Beast to Past Lives and Everything Everywhere All at Once, contemporary love stories are increasingly embedding science-fiction concepts into their narratives, says Meg Walters.
This article contains spoilers for The Beast.
Since its inception, cinema has been wrestling with one emotion over all others: love. How does one truly capture that grand, magical feeling of being in love, and that gaping abyss that opens up when it’s lost? It’s a question that has fascinated filmmakers – and, indeed, artists in every other medium – for generations. Their efforts to answer it have been wide-ranging. There are pitch-perfect duets that seal off Disney’s happily ever afters; the soft, hazy lighting and violin swell of a 1930s melodrama; the ping-ponging repartee of a Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers rom-com; the understated yearning glances of an ill-fated love story like Brief Encounter (1945) or Before Sunrise (1995).
But in recent years, an increasing number of filmmakers have been experimenting with a different, and rather unexpected, tactic: venturing into the realm of science fiction. By playing with the concept of unlived lives and multiple dimensions, the new sci-fi-meets-romantic-drama is less interested in individual love stories than in the concept of how a great love can, somehow, connect us to the universe as a whole.
This movement in the romantic-drama genre is nowhere more evident than in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast. Opening in 2044, the film presents us with a bleak future in which artificial intelligence has made humans (with all of those complicated emotions they tend to have) largely redundant. The unfulfilled Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is considering having a procedure that will remove her emotionality – and therefore making her a suitable worker – by taking her back through the traumas she experienced in her forgotten past lives. As she undergoes the procedure, we meet two previous incarnations of her: Gabrielle of 1910, a gifted pianist living in Paris, and Gabrielle of 2014, a struggling actor trying to make it big in Los Angeles.
In each of Gabrielle’s three lives, she encounters, and is strangely drawn to, Louis (George MacKay). In 1910, they have an affair; in 2014, Louis is reincarnated as a dangerous incel who stalks her from a nightclub to her home; in 2044, they cross paths when preparing for their emotion-suppressing procedures. The result is a strange, twisted love story that sweeps across not only multiple years, but multiple lives.
The Beast (2023)
Bonnello’s notion – that real love expands beyond an individual moment, and is in fact tied to all other times before and after – is one that plays out in a number of other recent sci-fi romances. In Jennifer Lopez’s divisive visual album This Is Me… Now (2024), for instance, she suggests her real-life love affair with Ben Affleck is somehow one and the same as the Puerto Rican Legend of the Hummingbird, a myth that originated among the Taíno tribe. As Lopez’s ‘Artist’ explains in the film, it was said that lovers Alida and Taroo sought help from the gods when their love was forbidden; the gods responded by turning Alida into a flower and Taroo into a hummingbird. She and Affleck are, she muses, reincarnated versions of the star-crossed lovers of that story. And, naturally, the universe (in the form of bizarre, humanoid iterations of the Zodiac symbols) are there to guide her on her path.
Meanwhile, in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan continue to cross paths in infinite dimensions. In one, they are a financially struggling married couple; in another, they are childhood sweethearts doomed to be separated by circumstance. The genre-bending film may not be classified as a romantic drama, but its multiversal love story gave us one of the most romantic lines of that year: ‘In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.’
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
While the full-on science-fiction version of the romantic drama may feel like a new leap in filmmaking, we have been creeping towards this kind of larger-than-life representation of love for quite some time. Back in 1998, Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors saw Gwyneth Paltrow’s Helen splitting off onto two separate paths – one where she misses a train and the other where she catches it – in a multidimensional exploration of unlived lives. In 2004, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind presented a sci-fi-esque world in which people can opt to have their minds wiped of all memories of a past relationship as a form of therapy – a premise not unlike the one at the centre of Bonello’s latest film.
More recently, there was last year’s Past Lives, which teetered on the edge of the mystical, toying with these sci-fi themes without daring to represent them in full mystical Technicolor as Bonello does in The Beast. Celine Song’s debut brought us the understated story of Nora (Greta Lee), who, after emigrating from South Korea to New York and settling down with a perfectly nice American playwright (John Magaro), reconnects with her first childhood love Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). As she reflects on her own path-not-taken and love-not-realised, she references the spiritual South Korean concept of inyun – the idea that any couple who gets together only does so after having just missed each other over thousands of past lives.
Past Lives (2023)
‘What they feel for each other is so much deeper. It spans decades,’ says Nora, explaining people who share this sense of inyun. ‘It’s an inyun if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there’s been 8,000 layers of inyun over 8,000 lifetimes.’ At one point, Nora and Hae Sung playfully muse about who they were to each other in their past lives – perhaps a queen and her lover; perhaps a bird sitting on a branch. Inyun is a distinctly fantastical, almost supernatural concept. Though it is contained within mournful, philosophical conversations in Past Lives, it is something that plays out in full science-fiction glory in The Beast. Bonello allows us to watch three of his characters’ 8,000 layers of inyun play out, and ultimately shows us how those layers add up to create that ineffable, complicated feeling we call love.
In The Beast’s final act, we experience the horrors of an unfulfilled inyun. Upon finishing her procedure, Gabrielle learns that she is one of the rare few for whom it doesn’t work. Now, she retains the visceral memories of her past lives along with the emotions that come with them. She searches for Louis, her soulmate, in different ways, across all of those previous lives, only to discover that his procedure has been a success. He knows who she is to him across all of their past incarnations, but he feels nothing – he has, effectively, been emptied.
The Beast (2023)
We are left with an unsettling, crushing final image: Gabrielle realises that her romantic destiny, her primal need to be with Louis can never truly be satisfied. After seeing their love story play out across their past lives, this final realisation is all the more heart-wrenching and horrifying to witness.
The Beast, and the other sci-fi-leaning love stories that came before it, are a sign that the romantic drama is changing gears. We are leaving behind the quiet, domestic love stories of the past and entering an era of mystical, grandiose love on film. Love that can only truly be explained in multiple dimensions and multiple versions of our lives, love that needs a little dose of science fiction to translate onto the screen.
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