elc team
In cinemas from 17 October
The Beast (2024), directed by Bertrand Bonello, is a blend of science fiction, horror, and romance, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay. The film is set across three timelines—1910, 2014, and 2044—where the two leads, Gabrielle (Seydoux) and Louis (MacKay), navigate complex emotional and existential crises across these periods.
In the future (2044), Gabrielle lives in a world dominated by artificial intelligence, where emotions are seen as dangerous. To escape her past traumas, she undergoes a “DNA purification” process to rid herself of her inherited emotional baggage. Meanwhile, Louis faces his own struggles, reflecting themes from Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle, on which the movie is loosely based. The story also explores Gabrielle’s fear of impending disaster and how it affects her relationships, particularly with Louis.
Each timeline presents a different version of their connection, with the 2014 section delving into contemporary issues, including social isolation and incel culture. Bonello’s film is noted for its unsettling atmosphere, drawing from both psychological horror and Lynchian symbolism, including recurring motifs like dolls and birds that signal ominous events.
The film has garnered attention for its thought-provoking exploration of emotions in a dystopian future and for Seydoux’s compelling performance. Bonello’s narrative questions whether escaping emotional pain is worth sacrificing life’s deeper, often painful, experiences, like love and art.
Overall, The Beast has been praised for its ambition, blending philosophical themes with visual creativity, although it has also been described as challenging due to its nonlinear storytelling and dark subject matter
Bertrand Bonelot, he says, “wanted to make a melodrama, and Henry James’ play is for me one of the most heartbreaking and beautiful melodramatic novels. One of his main ideas is that love is fear. Since I wanted to mix genres in the film and at the same time explore this fear, I moved the action to a modern universe and created a futuristic story in which man faces a terrible dilemma: to choose between being able to love and being able to work…“.
The film speaks of the future, but also of our present. “The film is set in 2044, but now I see that AI is already incredibly present in our lives. And I didn’t realise that when I was writing the film. I like science fiction, but it feels almost familiar. Usually it’s post-apocalyptic, but I wanted to look at it through a different lens”.
The couple first meet in 1910, at the time of the great flood in Paris, when the Seine was so high that everyone had to get around in boats. “That is the closest sequence in the book. All the dialogue comes from there, as do the themes, which then develop naturally in the other two periods. Each section of the film is based on a personal and a collective catastrophe. In 1910, for example, everyone thought that a new century of peace and progress was dawning, but the 20th century was terrible“.
The film received rave reviews when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
