1910, Paris.  Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and her husband, Georges (Martin Scali), run the premier doll factory in town.  She reunites by chance with Louis (George MacKay), an old friend, and confesses to him her fear of suffering a great tragedy.  Los Angeles, 2014.  Gabrielle is housesitting for an architect in his luxury home.  After an earthquake strikes, she accepts an offer from Louis, a meninist YouTuber, to walk her home.  2044, Paris.  In order to get ahead in her career as the job market has been overrun with an AI workforce, Gabrielle agrees to purify her DNA so that she can become a more competitive worker.  When the procedure fails, she drowns her sorrows at the bar when her eyes catch Louis from across the dance floor. 

The Beast is a triptych directed by Bertrand Bonello from a script he wrote with Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit, adapting Henry James’ 1903 short story “The Best in the Jungle.”  It premiered in competition at the 2023 edition of the Venice International Film Festival under its original title, La Bête, and was picked up by Janus Films for state-side distribution.  Running 145 minutes, the film is beguiling in nature but serves as a synthetization of many of the themes that have enamored Bonello across his oeuvre.  While not strictly separated into chapters as the timelines are a little tangled – though clearly defined – the film is most easily digested and discussed when looking at it as three stories that are thematically related. 

Working through the film chronologically, the France section most clearly calls back to Bonello’s House of Tolerance (2011) which followed a group of women in a Parisian brothel at the turn of the century and also chronicled a saga of violence enacted on the women by the clientele.  Each of these three stories has enough material and thought to support their own narrative, and while the period section seems to be the most developed in that visually it requires a lot more than the other two, it is also a very strange way to open the film.  Bonello is not interested in welcoming his audience into this film and this first timeline seems to actively push them away for the first half of it.  It is not until Gabrielle and Louis begin to seriously engage that the story begins to take form, and from there, that relationship will inform and frame the rest of the story to come.  While it stands apart from the 2014 and 2044 sequences, removing it from the film would be like building a house without first laying the foundation.  Here, Benello is propping up the image of a doll – a replica of a human figure without any agency over its own existence – as the inspiring metaphor for the entire film, though he wisely weaves this into the film as a plot point more than a thesis statement. 

When the film breaks into the second act, it is nothing short of whiplash as Louis, now a rich kid with expensive polo shirts and sunglasses records a video for YouTube detailing how he does not understand why women do not want to be with him.  Beyond the gross rhetoric, much of which was lifted from Elliot Rodger’s own manifesto written ahead of his committing of the Isla Vista killings which left 6 dead and 14 injured, MacKay takes on a totally different kind of character than we had seen before, but peeling back the layers, both Louises still share a dangerous obsession: Gabrielle.  For much of this middle tale, the two are apart as MacKay records his pining musings for his online audience and Gabrielle struggles to find an audience of her own as an aspiring actress.  The two meet in the neighborhood cul-de-sac after an earthquake and strike up a tentative conversation and when Gabrielle invites him back to the house, we are overcome with dread.  It is well-founded, and as Louis becomes more and more aggressive, cornering Gabrielle in a locked bedroom, Bonello continually cuts to the security cameras allowing us to see plenty of angles throughout the home which means there are just more corners for Louis to be lurking behind.    

It is here that Bonello begins to really blur the lines of his story with how we cold opened in 2044 where Gabrielle was against nothing more than a green screen and being instructed by a disembodied directorial voice to act afraid.  The director’s words echo again, Gabrielle screams, and then a perversely merciful gunshot that ends Gabrielle’s terror.  She was the doll in this situation, acted upon by her surroundings and stripped of her agency, finally discarded of when she had no further use. 

Bonello is not finished as he returns to 2044 where we left Gabrielle in a tub of black goo and a probe inserted into her ear meant to purify her memories; to wipe clean the slate and become pliable, whatever the master desires.  Another doll.  Teetering into some Black Mirror territory, what initially feels like the weak link of the film when it is introduced to us piecemeal is actually one of the strongest.  Bonello bookends his film with a parable about the dangers of technology, specifically AI, but the warning can be applied to many aspects of how we interact with technology.  It is meant to bring us together, but so often it becomes alienating.  The proliferation of green screen technology has unlocked incredible worlds of wonder in our films, but it can remove the community from the storytelling.  We see this as Gabrielle is alone on a drafty soundstage, acting out a scene that decades prior would have been on a set with her scene partner or a puppeteer controlling the titular beast, and decades prior to that it would have been acted out on stage, and centuries prior to that it would have been told as a story to a clan huddled around a central fire.  Technology has removed the humanity from our most human form of expression.  This can further be teased out to examine how we communicate using social media.  As we scroll through Instagram and see the luxurious lives “lived” by influencers, we begin to look around at our own surroundings and it all feels less than full.  It is as if our own lives are not complete, but what we see on our feeds is all a facsimile, manufactured and manicured and funded by brands sneaking their advertisements into our homes and the plans of our hands.  Now, with the rise of AI “art,” we are inundated even more with soulless images that appear just a little off of center and unnerving, and despite the advancements, we still have not escaped the uncanny valley.   

The mic drop moment in this thesis statement comes at the very end, not in Seydoux’s haunting and blood-curdling scream when across the bar Louis walks in once more, but in the QR code displayed on screen in lieu of traditional credits.  Bonello has starkly removed the humanity and replaced it with technology, a shapeless, black and white demon – a beast – staring back at us from behind the screen with dead and soulless eyes. 

The Beast is a challenging work, but not one that is so esoteric that it becomes wholly inaccessible.  It is not an easy work, but it is an engaging one as it paints a gradient from a science-fiction plot to a warning sign, and finally, a cry for help.  Social commentary is one of the strongest forms of science fiction, and Bonello, never one to shy away from picking at the social scabs to make them sting, blends his many fascinations here in a wonderful anthology.  As mentioned, it features the luscious period settings of House of Tolerance, the youthful angst and rage as found in Nocturama (2016), and both the haunting nature and multi-structed story as found in Zombi Child (2019).  It is a frustrating statement in the best of ways, a film that refuses to be easily defined, but when given the time to open up and unfold at its unique pace, Bonello delivers one of the most striking films of the year that will linger in the darker corners of our thoughts like a shadowy beast waiting to strike.