‘The Beast’ Review: Léa Seydoux and George MacKay Circle Each Other Through Time in Bertrand Bonello’s Languid Sci-Fi
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic It does rather feel as if the universe — or at least the French film industry — is trying to tell us something when 2023 has turned up not one but two loose Gallic adaptations of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” That 1903 novella was about a man, John Marcher, who fails to fully live his life because he’s seized by premonitions of catastrophe that never visibly come to pass.
It feels glumly relevant in an age of climate change, artificial intelligence and other obvious but indefinite signals of human demise; perhaps we should count this highly specific cinematic mini-trend as another.
Spare a thought for director Patric Chiha’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” a Berlinale premiere earlier this year, with an already modest profile about to be dwarfed by Bertrand Bonello’s starrier, bigger-swinging “The Beast” — a gender-switched James riff in which said catastrophe is very much happening, hovering in the wings or dully in the past, depending on which of its three timelines you’re in.
It’s a typically heady brew from Bonello, fashioning the story as a tragic romance spun out across centuries, variously buffeted by the tragedies of natural disaster, toxic masculinity and technological takeover.
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