Bertrand Bonello’s new film is a vast unsettling dream of the future and the past; it stars Léa Seydoux, whose poise, creamy moue of discontent and gorgeous fashion sense are all part of the film’s enigma. The Beast is audacious and traumatisingly sexual, maybe Bonello’s best movie yet (and I have been agnostic about his work). It’s rich, strange, with a chilly indifference to your viewing comfort and a tremor of imminent disaster.
It is a film about the shock of the new, the realisation that technology is on the point of modifying and even abolishing humanity without our consent; it invites us to test our thumb on the cutting edge of modernity and draw blood. Director and co-writer Bonello has been loosely inspired by Henry James’s story The Beast in the Jungle from 1903 about a man paralysed by his neurotic conviction that something awful is about to happen to him, a beast invisibly crouched in the jungle of the future. But Bonello finds something exciting and erotic in this inscrutable danger, as well as in the mysterious feeling that the past and the future are equally unknowable, and equally tantalising in their promise of revelation. And his film insists that there is nothing necessarily absurd in this fear, or meaningless in our wait: perhaps in this era of the climate crisis, a stricken inactive waiting is what we have been reduced to.
