2024 | Unrated (R equivalent) | starring Lea Seydoux and George MacKay | directed by Bartrand Bonello | 2h 24m | In French with Subtitles | 2 1/2 out of 5 stars |
In the year 2044, all of society is run by artificial intelligence, having effectively wiped-out human emotion and bias from the social order. In that world, Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) is counseled by an AI to “purify her DNA” during a process that sends her back in time to 1910 and 2014, in one lifetime where she takes on the life of an aristocrat and doll-maker in France and another where she plays a house guest in LA, yet all 3 realities intersect with a man named Louis (George MacKay, 1917) that draws them together in dangerous ways.
The Beast has a pretty heady sci-fi premise that it delivers as pretentiously as it possibly can. It’s not a first for a French film to break form, pause, rewind, fast-forward and otherwise call attention to all 4 walls of the movie that you’re watching, it’s particularly intrusive here where the story could have stood on its own without the meta-narrative. The movie isn’t as unique or thoughtful as co-writer/director Bartrand Bonello seems to think. This slow-burn Black Mirror doesn’t so much have new things to say, as it does reframe said things in a somewhat new and interesting way. I liked a few of the bait-and-switches, what at first looks like our heroine being loaded into The Matrix blank space without a program queued up turns out to be a literally green screen on a movie set. Conversely, what first appears to be something like a therapist, slowly reveals itself to be an AI itself. And there is something extra creepy about hearing an AI talk about how it purified the world of human emotion for the better from its own digital mouth. This movie draws up an idea that would make for an even better movie – a straight line between how often AI is pitched as something that will improve the world by removing human bias an emotion from it and how that is basically the same pitch that the alien pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers used to replace and dominate us. We resisted it then and love it now.
From there, the movie plays out a bit like Black Mirror’s San Junipero, with our leads experiencing a virtual romance in the lives of their ancestors with Assassin’s Creed DNA technology. First in a costume period piece, and then in the modern streets of Paris and finally in a glass LA mansion, all of which hurdle toward the feeling of impending catastrophe, involving water. The first scenario is slow beyond words. A period piece that takes forever to say what it’s saying. The modern day section works better as a thriller, but is dumb, it’s characters broadly drawn on stereotypes and unlikable. In the 2014 section, Gabrielle is a spoiled girl housesitting for someone else, while Louis is a self-professed incel who plans to get revenge on all women. In a bit of dialog that gives away how superficial the characters are, Louis goes on about how he can’t get a girl and then takes the further step of saying that he “deserves” one. This is a phrase that no incel actually says, but critics of them believe they think. It’s just one glaring example of how Bonello’s inability to make these characters real hurts the film and all of their goals.
The Beast is a genre mash-up, kind of a sci-fi film, kind of a character drama, kind of a horror movie. All of it executed as dryly, dispassionately and cynically as French films tend to be. It’s a cliche at this point and Bonella should have capped off the film (there are no credits anyway) with the word “Fin” just to hammer home how much he despises his potential audience here.