The Cinematheque

Vancouver Premiere

“The Beast​’s visions are impossible to shake … Nothing hits with as much force as the film’s climactic moments, which transpose James’s cataclysmic portrait to sci-fi speculative territory.”

Keith Uhlich, Slant Magazine

A high-concept enigma with the best use of green screen since Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, Bertrand Bonello’s latest genre-exploding film is, at its core, a time-skipping romance that could just as well be subtitled ​“Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages.” The Beast takes after Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle, its title suggestive of the threat that waits out of sight. This danger is palpable in all three eras in which we encounter Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay)—the end of la belle époque, a recent chapter in millennial violence, and the not-so-distant year of 2044. James’s protagonist is haunted by a sense of déjà vu, ​“the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning,” and Bonello obliges this prompt, tying on threads of reincarnated fate to the duo’s fraught encounters with courtship, computers, and other courses of rerouted desire. No other film last year quite resembled The Beast.

In French and English with English subtitles

“Bonello keeps the flow of striking, uncanny images coming … [The Beast] suggests a filmmaker interested in both the mechanics and metaphysics of manipulation, and also in limning the difference between time-tested genre tropes and the raw terror of reality itself.”

Adam Nayman, Film Comment

“[An] unparalleled and engrossing technophobia vision … Wrings from James’s tale of fate and loneliness something suitably grotesque, oblique, and at times even trollish—wholly resonant with our times.”

Elissa Suh, Literary Hub