NZIFF: The Beast

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay’s fatal attraction endures across space and time in Bertrand Bonello’s audacious Lynchian reflection on love and obsession, mixing sci-fi, melodrama, and horror across three different time frames.

Love in the time of AI. Léa Seydoux and George MacKay are star-crossed lovers chasing and escaping each other in different times and on different sides of the fence of attraction in Bertrand Bonello’s mesmerizing adaptation and expansion of Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle.

The Beast frames Gabrielle (Seydoux) and Louis (MacKay) meeting at three different moments in time, in 1910, in 2014 and in 2044. The future setting, playing out in a deserted Paris eerily devoid of human presence, provides the conceptual catch: in times to come, to better perform in life and work, humans will be able to purify their DNA from burdensome sediments of memories and previous lives. Call it the high-tech version of a lobotomy. As Gabrielle is reluctantly about to undergo the procedure, she incidentally meets the weirdly familiar Louis. Because indeed, the two had met in previous incarnations: at the time of the Great Flood of Paris, as aristocrats who fail to admit the reciprocal enamourment, and in present days LA, as an actress housesitting a villa and an incel bound to take revenge on women.

Venturing in thematic and narrative territories close to Cronenberg and Lynch, Bonello forges a seductive triptych that is both elegant and edgy, cerebral and desperately romantic. An instant classic of auteur cinema hurling an unforgettable cry for love. — Paolo Bertolin