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The Beast Movie Review

The Beast is a 2024 science fiction romantic drama film directed by Bertrand Bonello and starring Lea Seydoux and George MacKay. It’s a solid and interesting, but uneven flick.

As artificial intelligence reigns, emotions have become a threat. To get rid of it, Gabrielle must purify her DNA by diving back into her past lives. She finds a great love there as well as a bad feeling. This is the first time that I watched a film from this previously unknown director to me. I do find his filmmaking style to be ambitious and artistic, but also rather disorganized and cumbersome.

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I appreciated the originality on display here. The movie is unlike any other genre film I’ve seen for better and for worse. Because it explored its themes potently, it can be classified as more of a romantic drama with SF elements, but those elements are significant as a framing device and also as thematic accompaniers. How this machine worked was not explained properly, but it was an interesting experiment to hop from one period to another all the while being connected by a common plot thread.

I did not quite care for the 1910 section. Those sequences were a bit too stuffy and overly traditional, though undeniably gorgeously shot. The costumes and sets were exquisite for sure. I loved the score and the cinematography too. The 2044 section was the most genre-focused of the bunch and that one appealed to me most. As for the 2014 section, it was overly contemporary and biased in its depiction of misogyny, though the movie also posits that withholding your emotions can be quite bad, especially for women.

The Beast’s central theme is the exploration of human emotions and how guarding ourselves from feeling something deeper is never a good thing. This can damage our psyche and leave is in a vulnerable position. Fear of love and connection in the modern era is the biggest culprit of alienation and depression in today’s society and this exploration made the movie quite timely and important.

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Lea Seydoux is just as wonderful as always while George MacKay of ‘1917’ fame was also very well cast and quite memorable. The romantic scenes between the two are strong in all eras. I just wished that the characterization was stronger. Seydoux is superb, but more could have been done with her character. The movie is intriguing, but more as individual sequences than as a whole given that it is so unwieldy, so oddly paced and structured, and ultimately way too long and slow to be enjoyed fully.