Léa Seydoux and George MacKay star in Bertrand Bonello’s romantic drama, which aims to be a larger-than-life epic
If David Lynch has always done something well, it is not explaining his films, and allowing the viewer to draw their own conclusions (even if it causes a lot of frustration). In the case of ‘The Beast’, a film that tries to reference both the cinema of the director of ‘Blue Velvet’, director Bertrand Bonello has indeed gotten more involved with some of the most cryptic elements of his film.
Obviously, this post is full of spoilers about the movie ‘The beast’
Love through time
Although ‘The beast’ pretends to be a cinematic puzzle, the truth is that a general look at the film already gives us all the information necessary to understand the basics: Gabrielle is a woman in 2044 who, to get a job, decides to go through a “purification” process.
This purification consists of purge your past lives (regardless of how that fits into this futuristic premise), and the woman remembers two past periods of her existence. In both, Gabrielle fell in love with a young man (George MacKay) but the influence of A kind of evil beast prevents them from being together in all of them..
In 1910, a sudden and certainly strange fire led to the death of both by drowning, while in 2014, the beast repeated the encounter between the two a thousand and one times. until finding the only version in which he ended up shooting him to her.
In the life of 2044, it seems that they will finally be able to be together but something greater than death overtakes them: he has completed the purification and will never be able to love her because he has removed his feelings. Such an unfortunate ending is followed by post credits scene in the form of a QR, which features the fortune teller warning her not to enter room 241.
Director’s explanation
Despite all the twists and turns that the story takes, it is quite clear what the background plot is in ‘The Beast’. But where was Bertrand Bonello going with all this? For now, the director confirmed in an interview that fear of love was the main theme of the story:
“The basis of the idea of fear of love comes from Henry James, and then I decided to take the two feelings of fear and love as far as I could through various periods (of time), various genres, the corruption of those genres and that kind of thing. In a way, fear became a more important element than love.”
“It can also be the fear of the unknown, or of catastrophe, or of everything. The strong point of the novel is this idea that something is going to happen, which is fantastic when directing. There is a beast, but it is invisible. That gives a lot of play to the imagination and also in the script.”
In relation to the latter, Bonello emphasized that, although he agrees with Henry James’ vision in the original novel of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, and considers that the beast is nothing more than the metaphor of the fear of loverepresents her in the film ambiguously to leave room for interpretation:
“Yes, you can see the silhouette (of the beast), but it is something that serves more to create a mental image that makes you scream. Until the end, they do not know what the beast is, that beast that is simply the fear of love. I say this but, when I have been asked what the beast is, I have answered: ‘The beast is whatever you want it to be.’ For some people it is technology. If I stick to what Henry James wrote, it is fear. to love, but it seems good to me that everyone sees the beast wherever they want. It is the idea of catastrophe, that something stronger than you is going to destroy everything.
Regarding the post-credits scene, Bonello explained that he wanted something like the films of the 40s and 50s, which ended after the last scene without credits or anything. That’s how he came up with the idea of ending the film. putting the last scene and the credits through a QR code:
“It wasn’t in the script, it came to us in the editing room while we were watching the film. I wanted something abrupt for the end. (…) The QR code fit me with the dehumanization of the film at that time, in 2044. “When George has become a kind of robot and you have Gabrielle there, who exudes humanity, and that makes her feel even more alone, QR seemed very cold to me and the right choice.”
Dead end
Personally, I think the film is intended to be a kind of maze in the style of ‘Mulholland Drive’ or ‘Lost Highway’, but it takes too many turns and mixes elements that do not finish filling with each other so that in the end it is assumed that what was interesting was telling an epic romance.
Especially because he fails to move with his love story at any time (it soon bores mortally with its first half of footage) and that means that we do not eat the expected impact of that ending, in which our heart should break at the same time as Léa Seydoux’s, after definitively losing her supposed love. his life when they finally seemed to have defeated death.
Bonello has good ideas, and accurately reflects concepts such as the disturbing advance of technology or the portrait of that incel obsessed with revenge. However, he fails to weave the web that connects all the elements of his film and remains an irregular pastiche of 145 minutes. So now you know: beware of demonic pigeons.
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