Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying new feature, The Beast, begins in medias res with an actor (Léa Seydoux) screen-testing on a soundstage covered wall-to-wall in green screen. Off camera, a disembodied male voice directs the actor to react in terror to a beast closing in on her. On hand is a kitchen knife, the sole prop to protect herself against a threat that will be added in later. The instant the director calls “action”, we see the actor morph into character. Muscles tense. Eyes dart from side to side. The dread of an unseen beast is met with a blood-curdling scream. The situation may not be real. The beast may not be real. But her response is primal, as if kindled not from nothingness but from several lifetimes of pain. When the camera zooms in for a close-up, we can read the hurt off her eyes alone.
Watching the process of an actor becoming a character means we are also watching Seydoux become one. There is a poetry of stifled longing to the French star’s face, her gaze, her luminous beauty, that becomes the underlying thread of Bonello’s artfully woven tapestry of love thwarted by fear of loss. As to the nature of the beast, it isn’t some flesh-and-blood entity. Much like in the Henry James story, The Beast in the Jungle, that Bonello quite freely builds from, it is a manifestation of the disastrous unease that makes a person reluctant to accept love. It is a projection of a heart blighted by emotional insularity. It is the knot in the stomach preventing the protagonist from loving, thereby from living.
In an almost-romance spanning centuries, Gabrielle (Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay) are reincarnated as doomed lovers, always living under a shadow of some looming disaster. Being descendants of John Marcher and May Bartram from James’s novella, the pair is similarly beset by unfulfilled desires. The story of John and May’s decades-long relationship was told in six chapters and some 50 to 70-odd pages (depending on the edition). Bonello uses the source text less as a point of reference, more as a point of departure. As he riffs on its themes instead of adhering to its plot, he locates a grand sweeping fresco of love and fear as forces of creation and destruction, extending from the past through the present to the future. The Beast is science fiction as an endless lamentation; romance as an elusive embrace.
With John Marcher, James had created the enduring archetype of the pathological fatalist. Here was a man who spent his life preparing for “something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible,” a select destiny awaiting him like “a crouching beast in the jungle.” Only the epiphany — that he had wasted his life waiting — arrives too late. All the waiting circumscribes his living so much he fails to realise May’s love. In the end, his destiny becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: to be the one man in the world to whom nothing whatever was to happen. As May tells John at one point, “You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.”
Gabrielle’s story, as opposed to John’s, isn’t as uneventful. The chronology-jumping is set in motion by a futuristic apparatus. It is Paris 2044. Artificial intelligence run a tight ship, controlling every aspect of humanity. Emotions have been embargoed so as to not hamstring job performance. The surgical procedure for purging those pesky human things is forbiddingly termed as “purification.” Denizens of this future are made to submerge their bodies in a pool of inky black goo to get rid of unresolved baggage from past lives, like one gets rid of kidney stones today. It is catharsis without the satisfaction however.
When Gabrielle and Louis undergo the procedure, the two find themselves drawn to previous incarnations of each other in each of their broadcasted past lives, from Belle Époque Paris on the eve of the Great Flood in 1910 to a more familiar Los Angeles on the eve of an earthquake in 2014. As Gabrielle works through whatever leftover emotions, she begins to resist their erasure. The past, she decides, isn’t something she would like to forget, no matter how painful it may be. Nor are emotions a bug in the human code. Convinced the connection that binds her to Louis is strong enough to withstand the trials of time, she stands her ground. Even if a romantic stasis holds her desire in arrest, the question is: can an epochally changing Louis mount a parallel resistance against the AI?
At a soirée in 1910 Paris, as a married Gabrielle wanders from salon to salon in search of her husband, she runs into Louis, an Englishman who insists the two have met before in Florence. (This section not only echoes James’s opening chapter but also Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad.) Gabrielle remains sceptical. Until Louis reminds her of the secret they shared: a premonition of a nebulous beast. When she queries if they conversed in English or French the last time, his response, “We mixed tongues,” teases an intimacy well beyond mere pleasantries. Only when he confesses his love this time, she declines the offer — with discernible hesitation. All chances of a grand romance are nonetheless washed away with the flooding of the Seine.
A whole century later, the star-crossed lovers meet again in Los Angeles circa 2014. Gabrielle, now a model aspiring to be an actress, is house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills. Louis, now an incel, stalks her from the shadows. When he isn’t shadowing her, he is recording self-piteous vlog entries blaming women for his lack of romantic success and swearing vengeance on a world that has left him a lonely virgin. These disturbing yet comical ramblings are ripped straight from the manifestos of American spree killer Elliot Rodger.
Beast begets beast. Fear turns into frustration. The rejection of love in one era stokes the rage of violent misogyny in another. This striking change in Louis’ personality signals the withering of the gentlemanly ideal into an aggrieved entitlement. Belle Époque Louis is happy to play the waiting game like a patient lover. Modern-day Louis, coming from a culture of instant gratification and a community of red-pilled extremists, is not. He is a man whose sense of superiority masks a deeper insecurity. So, desire curdles into anger, misdirecting what is, in fact, a hatred of the self towards women who won’t give him the love he believes he is owed. That he is ready to turn to violence reveals how easy it is to lose one’s humanity to the beast within.
Although the beast continues to nip at her heels across the ages, Gabrielle never loses hers. Not when she is a married pianist in a costumed melodrama, refusing love at the cost of her happiness. Not when she is caught on the wrong end of a cat-and-mouse thriller that strips a modern masculinity crisis down to its naked, toxic, quivering id. Not even when she is made to purge her emotions to maximise work productivity in a techno-fascist dystopia. Bonello’s choice to flip the gender of James’s protagonist enables unexpected revelations about the social and cultural expectations women must battle. The switcheroo is not a hollow one. It is a choice that alters the very DNA of the original text, while providing Seydoux a carte blanche to reinvent the character for herself.
Once all the emotions have been purged from memory, the “purified” workers of the future come together at a nightclub that hosts retro-themed parties in homage to decades past. One night, party goers dance to throwback hits from the 1970s. Another night, it is the 1980s. As a reward for the emotions lost, the AI allows the humans to indulge in an antiseptic form of nostalgia in controlled conditions — a nightmarish extension of our present-day nostalgia industrial complex. The beast of Hollywood, in particular, has been guilty of cannibalising itself. Its studios continue to peddle soulless cash grabs, commodifying the past we long for, filtered through the present we want to escape from.
To call into question the very authenticity of human emotions in all its messiness, Bonello flirts with the boundaries of what constitutes expression vs imitation. Music is used as a frame of reference. While talking about the atonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg in the 1910 section, Gabrielle and Louis dwell on the notion of creating music without a soul. No more just a notion though, with AI being able to imitate Bach-style chorale cantatas so well it seems most can’t tell the difference. The operative word is “imitate”. Because there is no real expression of self or an inner truth. It’s the same reason why critics balk at the art produced by generative AI. If art is flattened down for mere consumption and divorced from our drive for creation, it is unquestionably stripped of its beauty, its humanity, its soul.
Dolls are another frame of reference. When 1910 Gabrielle freezes her face to mimic the neutral expression of a celluloid doll from her husband’s factory, it provokes an uncanny valley effect in reverse. This feeling of eeriness only inflames when the dolls burn in a fire during the Great Flood. Later, a spooky talking doll adds to the torment of the 2014 Gabrielle, a wannabe actress forced to consider cosmetic surgery — doll up — for better opportunities. Fast-forward to 2044: humanoid chaperones, known as dolls, are entrusted with aiding emotion-proofed humans orient themselves to their new reality.
It may be a reality about two decades removed from our present. You may believe the idea of a complete AI takeover by 2044 to be too fanciful. But the film’s chilling depiction of 2014 does hit close to home. The digital overload — from TV shows, YouTube videos, social media stories, CCTV footage and pop-up ads from fortune tellers — represents our own reality warped by media saturation. Gabrielle’s LA home alone is like a house of mirrors. It becomes a site of revelation and negotiation, of retrospection and foreboding, of love and violence, in a film of finite moments expressing the infinite. The opening scene is not just a meta-comment on image-making itself, but also a warning against mediating life through media, instead of living it.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying new feature, The Beast, begins in medias res with an actor (Léa Seydoux) screen-testing on a soundstage covered wall-to-wall in green screen. Off camera, a disembodied male voice directs the actor to react in terror to a beast closing in on her. On hand is a kitchen knife, the sole prop to protect herself against a threat that will be added in later. The instant the director calls “action”, we see the actor morph into character. Muscles tense. Eyes dart from side to side. The dread of an unseen beast is met with a blood-curdling scream. The situation may not be real. The beast may not be real. But her response is primal, as if kindled not from nothingness but from several lifetimes of pain. When the camera zooms in for a close-up, we can read the hurt off her eyes alone.
Watching the process of an actor becoming a character means we are also watching Seydoux become one. There is a poetry of stifled longing to the French star’s face, her gaze, her luminous beauty, that becomes the underlying thread of Bonello’s artfully woven tapestry of love thwarted by fear of loss. As to the nature of the beast, it isn’t some flesh-and-blood entity. Much like in the Henry James story, The Beast in the Jungle, that Bonello quite freely builds from, it is a manifestation of the disastrous unease that makes a person reluctant to accept love. It is a projection of a heart blighted by emotional insularity. It is the knot in the stomach preventing the protagonist from loving, thereby from living.
In an almost-romance spanning centuries, Gabrielle (Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay) are reincarnated as doomed lovers, always living under a shadow of some looming disaster. Being descendants of John Marcher and May Bartram from James’s novella, the pair is similarly beset by unfulfilled desires. The story of John and May’s decades-long relationship was told in six chapters and some 50 to 70-odd pages (depending on the edition). Bonello uses the source text less as a point of reference, more as a point of departure. As he riffs on its themes instead of adhering to its plot, he locates a grand sweeping fresco of love and fear as forces of creation and destruction, extending from the past through the present to the future. The Beast is science fiction as an endless lamentation; romance as an elusive embrace.
With John Marcher, James had created the enduring archetype of the pathological fatalist. Here was a man who spent his life preparing for “something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible,” a select destiny awaiting him like “a crouching beast in the jungle.” Only the epiphany — that he had wasted his life waiting — arrives too late. All the waiting circumscribes his living so much he fails to realise May’s love. In the end, his destiny becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: to be the one man in the world to whom nothing whatever was to happen. As May tells John at one point, “You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.”
Gabrielle’s story, as opposed to John’s, isn’t as uneventful. The chronology-jumping is set in motion by a futuristic apparatus. It is Paris 2044. Artificial intelligence run a tight ship, controlling every aspect of humanity. Emotions have been embargoed so as to not hamstring job performance. The surgical procedure for purging those pesky human things is forbiddingly termed as “purification.” Denizens of this future are made to submerge their bodies in a pool of inky black goo to get rid of unresolved baggage from past lives, like one gets rid of kidney stones today. It is catharsis without the satisfaction however.
When Gabrielle and Louis undergo the procedure, the two find themselves drawn to previous incarnations of each other in each of their broadcasted past lives, from Belle Époque Paris on the eve of the Great Flood in 1910 to a more familiar Los Angeles on the eve of an earthquake in 2014. As Gabrielle works through whatever leftover emotions, she begins to resist their erasure. The past, she decides, isn’t something she would like to forget, no matter how painful it may be. Nor are emotions a bug in the human code. Convinced the connection that binds her to Louis is strong enough to withstand the trials of time, she stands her ground. Even if a romantic stasis holds her desire in arrest, the question is: can an epochally changing Louis mount a parallel resistance against the AI?
At a soirée in 1910 Paris, as a married Gabrielle wanders from salon to salon in search of her husband, she runs into Louis, an Englishman who insists the two have met before in Florence. (This section not only echoes James’s opening chapter but also Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad.) Gabrielle remains sceptical. Until Louis reminds her of the secret they shared: a premonition of a nebulous beast. When she queries if they conversed in English or French the last time, his response, “We mixed tongues,” teases an intimacy well beyond mere pleasantries. Only when he confesses his love this time, she declines the offer — with discernible hesitation. All chances of a grand romance are nonetheless washed away with the flooding of the Seine.
A whole century later, the star-crossed lovers meet again in Los Angeles circa 2014. Gabrielle, now a model aspiring to be an actress, is house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills. Louis, now an incel, stalks her from the shadows. When he isn’t shadowing her, he is recording self-piteous vlog entries blaming women for his lack of romantic success and swearing vengeance on a world that has left him a lonely virgin. These disturbing yet comical ramblings are ripped straight from the manifestos of American spree killer Elliot Rodger.
Beast begets beast. Fear turns into frustration. The rejection of love in one era stokes the rage of violent misogyny in another. This striking change in Louis’ personality signals the withering of the gentlemanly ideal into an aggrieved entitlement. Belle Époque Louis is happy to play the waiting game like a patient lover. Modern-day Louis, coming from a culture of instant gratification and a community of red-pilled extremists, is not. He is a man whose sense of superiority masks a deeper insecurity. So, desire curdles into anger, misdirecting what is, in fact, a hatred of the self towards women who won’t give him the love he believes he is owed. That he is ready to turn to violence reveals how easy it is to lose one’s humanity to the beast within.
Although the beast continues to nip at her heels across the ages, Gabrielle never loses hers. Not when she is a married pianist in a costumed melodrama, refusing love at the cost of her happiness. Not when she is caught on the wrong end of a cat-and-mouse thriller that strips a modern masculinity crisis down to its naked, toxic, quivering id. Not even when she is made to purge her emotions to maximise work productivity in a techno-fascist dystopia. Bonello’s choice to flip the gender of James’s protagonist enables unexpected revelations about the social and cultural expectations women must battle. The switcheroo is not a hollow one. It is a choice that alters the very DNA of the original text, while providing Seydoux a carte blanche to reinvent the character for herself.
Once all the emotions have been purged from memory, the “purified” workers of the future come together at a nightclub that hosts retro-themed parties in homage to decades past. One night, party goers dance to throwback hits from the 1970s. Another night, it is the 1980s. As a reward for the emotions lost, the AI allows the humans to indulge in an antiseptic form of nostalgia in controlled conditions — a nightmarish extension of our present-day nostalgia industrial complex. The beast of Hollywood, in particular, has been guilty of cannibalising itself. Its studios continue to peddle soulless cash grabs, commodifying the past we long for, filtered through the present we want to escape from.
To call into question the very authenticity of human emotions in all its messiness, Bonello flirts with the boundaries of what constitutes expression vs imitation. Music is used as a frame of reference. While talking about the atonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg in the 1910 section, Gabrielle and Louis dwell on the notion of creating music without a soul. No more just a notion though, with AI being able to imitate Bach-style chorale cantatas so well it seems most can’t tell the difference. The operative word is “imitate”. Because there is no real expression of self or an inner truth. It’s the same reason why critics balk at the art produced by generative AI. If art is flattened down for mere consumption and divorced from our drive for creation, it is unquestionably stripped of its beauty, its humanity, its soul.
Dolls are another frame of reference. When 1910 Gabrielle freezes her face to mimic the neutral expression of a celluloid doll from her husband’s factory, it provokes an uncanny valley effect in reverse. This feeling of eeriness only inflames when the dolls burn in a fire during the Great Flood. Later, a spooky talking doll adds to the torment of the 2014 Gabrielle, a wannabe actress forced to consider cosmetic surgery — doll up — for better opportunities. Fast-forward to 2044: humanoid chaperones, known as dolls, are entrusted with aiding emotion-proofed humans orient themselves to their new reality.
It may be a reality about two decades removed from our present. You may believe the idea of a complete AI takeover by 2044 to be too fanciful. But the film’s chilling depiction of 2014 does hit close to home. The digital overload — from TV shows, YouTube videos, social media stories, CCTV footage and pop-up ads from fortune tellers — represents our own reality warped by media saturation. Gabrielle’s LA home alone is like a house of mirrors. It becomes a site of revelation and negotiation, of retrospection and foreboding, of love and violence, in a film of finite moments expressing the infinite. The opening scene is not just a meta-comment on image-making itself, but also a warning against mediating life through media, instead of living it.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.