The future presented in The Beast, Bertrand Bonello’s mesmeric blend of sci-fi, horror and romance, feels frighteningly plausible. In the wake of disaster, AI has taken on the responsibility of running civilisation, leaving 67 per cent of humanity unemployed. Decisions, now, are made entirely without bias or empathy, so that when Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) attempts to seek more fulfilling work, she’s forced to undergo a process of “purification”, in which her past lives, and all their inherited trauma, are scrubbed clean from her DNA.
The notion that we carry our ancestors’ sorrows, one proposed by certain corners of the scientific community, is an unnerving one. Here, the French filmmaker suggests it may be the true explanation for the amorphous “beast” once described in a Henry James novella. Its story concerns a man who rejects love and stability because he’s convinced some terrible catastrophe, moving unseen like a creature in the jungle, will one day strike him down. Gabrielle feels the same, and in Bonello’s sad, unshakeable film, it’s suggested that perhaps her fears are justified – some of us, it seems, are simply fated to be plagued by the same, cyclic miseries.
