‘The Beast’ Review: Bertrand Bonello’s Ambitiously Acceptable Sci-Fi Drama
Léa Seydoux and George MacKay give compelling turns in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, a sci-fi picture that ultimately loses itself in its massive ambitions.
The first half of Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast sees Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux) attempt to ‘purify’ her DNA inside a machine that will make her revisit her past lives to eliminate all of her emotions. The film is set in 2044, when machines have successfully integrated society and whose emotional shifts can’t be distinguished from the ones of humans (Saint Omer’s Guslagie Malanda plays one of those machines, a doll with enough ‘human’ emotional skills to appear so, but is plagued by eternal life).
In that DNA purifying machine, she meets Louis (George MacKay) during a scene set in the 1910s and thinks she has already met her. The two also meet inside the purification center, having a massive experience of déjà vu, but don’t bother beyond this. However, inside the machine, Gabrielle has strong feelings for Louis, and the two quickly fall in love inside a setting that inspires romantic passion, as discombobulated as the machine may be. This is all inspired by the cinema of David Lynch, in which the relationship between reality and fiction is quickly blurred. Bonello gives immediate visual clues as to when the movie is set inside the machine and when it’s real, making him a much less interesting artist than Lynch, who relied on the audience’s intelligence to figure everything out on their own and still to this day, has never agreed on anyone’s interpretation of his films (and likely won’t).
The film’s aspect ratio gives audiences a perspective as to when the film is set in reality (these scenes are shot in 1.33:1), a boxed-in view of the world that Gabrielle feels trapped in, where humans have relinquished their emotions in favor of a symbiosis between their lives and artificial intelligence, while the machine sequences are shot at the full frame, 1.85:1, where emotions are liberating for not only Gabrielle but Louis, as the two find themselves inside these perfectly-calibrated fictions of their past selves.
But the movie takes a sharp turn, as Gabrielle and Louis are transported to 2014 Los Angeles, where YouTube personality Louis Lewanski complains about the fact that girls don’t like him and don’t want to be around him while Gabrielle is being stalked by him, as he is ready to unleash “retribution” against the women who rejected his ‘supreme’ gentlemanly behavior. Sound familiar? That’s because it happened for real when Elliot Rodger stabbed his roommates and killed three women during the Isla Vista Killings in February 2014, which also injured fourteen other people.
Rodger made several videos complaining about the fact that women don’t want to be around him, leading him to make his “Retribution” video, in which he outlined what he would do on the day of the killings before ultimately ending his life in the aftermath of the attacks. These videos are recreated in painstaking detail by Bonello and MacKay, who chillingly imitate Rodger in a sarcastic, almost parodic light. At first, it’s morbidly funny, but it gets terribly uncomfortable as he continues to do it, not only filling the gaps in Rodger’s backstory (likely inspired by the manifesto he actually wrote, My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger), with his quasi-relationship with Gabrielle but in turn humanizes a monster who shouldn’t be understood or sympathized with.
Is Lewanski the titular ‘Beast’ the film depicts? No, and I’ll leave you to discover what that is on your own, but there are public figures we shouldn’t satirize because what they did in real life is so horrific on its own that they don’t warrant any attention. Rodger is one of them, and while Bonello wants to discuss the effects of incel culture on society, there would’ve been a much better way to handle this discussion by creating a character who may be slightly inspired by him but can be completely dissociated with Rodger.
As a result, the film’s second part is much weaker than its first because of its insistence on humanizing someone like Rodger, ultimately diverging its point of exploring how human emotions become diluted by the literal and figurative machines the protagonists have to live with in the future, but instead goes on a tangent that doesn’t feel warranted, and results in very little payoff in its ending, which will arguably divide most audience members who dare enter Bonello’s twisted, digitized world.
Thankfully, Seydoux and MacKay give compelling turns as Gabrielle and Louis and their on-screen relationship further complexifies by the time the film ends on a rather surprising – and daring note. MacKay seems poised to be a once-in-a-generation talent of equal charm and emotional depth as Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist, and Harris Dickinson. It’s a shame he’s reduced to imitating (and recreating, word-for-word) Elliot Rodger’s declarations, which don’t say much about incel culture, whether through a warning or social commentary on how society has latched onto the worst people on the internet as a way to justify their actions.
The movie also boldly chooses to have no end credits scroll on the screen, as Bonello encourages audiences to scan a QR code to view it (on their phones). This is Bonello's biggest commentary on society’s obsession with digitized images, reducing their consumption of anything on meager cellphones instead of connecting themselves with reality in front of them. It’s much more potent than endlessly recreating Elliot Rodger for the sake of satire and parody. This ultimately leaves The Beast with a foul taste in the mouth, even if its first act ambitions and performances are admirable enough to warrant curiosity and attention.