The Beast

“It’s violent. Psychiatric. Rather beautiful, I think,” Gabrielle (Seydoux) says. She’s staring at a painting as Louis (MacKay) stands with her, tethered to her every word. In such tender moments, it’s clear that Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is violent, psychiatric, and rather beautiful too. 

In 2044, where AI dominates and human emotion has almost been eradicated, we meet Gabrielle. She's one of the few humans who still brims with feeling, and is reluctantly attempting to "cleanse her DNA" by exploring her past lives. In her pasts and present, she's repeatedly drawn to Louis while simultaneously filled with an indescribable fear. A romance for an uncertain future, The Beast holds love and loss as one.

The film unfolds taut and sure of itself: in 2044 but also Paris in 1910 and LA in 2014. Bonello sparingly indulges in science fiction visuals: clinically futuristic spaces, all-too-empty streets, and technology that glows – a sudden bronze, a deep blue – with unknown potential. Seydoux carries the film with a performance at once generous and restrained. Her grace rests in an acute authenticity and we warm to it. MacKay, too, is unfaltering across three distinct characters (and accents) yet, somehow, manages to carry a core essence throughout. 

With slow, sunken scenes and an almost two-and-a-half-hour run time, The Beast is lengthy. Sometimes, it wants to overcomplicate itself. Narratives are sliced and sliced again; then, spliced together anew. However, it soon softens into itself and trades disorder for an accomplished simplicity. The Beast is instinctual, and gorgeously so.

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Released 31 May by Vertigo; certificate 15