Lions and poachers and snares, oh my! In the satisfyingly grisly survival thriller "Beast," Idris Elba plays a grieving widower who drags his two teenage daughters to a South African game reserve, embarking on an emotional journey that devolves into a nightmarish tussle with Mother Nature. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun; this one has two girls and several rifles, though one of them only fires none-too-effective tranquilizer darts. The movie's real weapon is a very large, very angry, skillfully computer-generated king of the jungle that turns out to have a major bone to pick (or crush) with the human race.
The animus is more than justified, given the ruinous state of the world in general and the ruthless poachers who've hunted these lions in particular. A few of those poachers come to a deservedly nasty end in the prologue, a tense nighttime set piece that establishes the human-versus-nature stakes and, no less important, a consistent, coherent visual scheme. Most of the mayhem in "Beast" is staged in lengthy, serpentine tracking shots that keep pace with the characters as they try to detect, evade and flee from a predator that might always be just a few lunges away. As his camera prowls the rugged terrain in precisely choreographed movements, director Baltasar Kormakur (working with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot) achieves a physical groundedness that makes even a digitally engineered predator seem palpably real.
That groundedness also anchors the predictably hokey if refreshingly straightforward narrative preliminaries laid out in Ryan Engle's screenplay (based on a story by Jaime Primak Sullivan). Nate Samuels (Elba) is a doctor, which you can bet is going to come in handy. He and his daughters — moody, photography-loving Mare (Iyana Halley) and spunky Norah (Leah Jeffries) — are visiting South Africa, the homeland of their recently deceased wife and mother. (The movie was shot on location in the country's Northern Cape province.) They're on a healing journey, or at least that's the idea; family friction keeps intruding, much of it rooted in Nate's specific failures as a husband and father.
