The Beast is the purest science fiction experience a movie can offer
This review of The Beast comes from the film’s screenings at the 2023 New York Film Festival.
On paper, the premise of Bertrand Bonello’s new science fiction movie La Bête, or The Beast, seems relatively easy to follow. In 2044, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is on the verge of undergoing a “purification” procedure to purge her DNA of the experiences, emotions, and traumas of her past lives from 2014 and 1910. First, though, she has to relive them in vivid detail.
It’s a time-travel story of sorts, but it begins out of time and outside its own fictional reality, opening with a voice from off screen (Bonello himself) directing Seydoux in an enormous green-screen room. As Seydoux, knife gripped tightly in hand, cowers from some unseen beast, this prologue sets the stage for images and abstract ideas that recur throughout the movie’s various timelines, from the terror of this encounter itself to themes of how simulacrums of reality evolve over time, and how the past becomes pastiche. All this is tied together by the invisible foreboding plaguing Gabrielle across three different lifetimes.
Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun — and worth fitting into your schedule. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch .
It’s a strange, oblique adaptation of Henry James’ 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” retaining only the overwhelming dread and depression James’ protagonist John Marcher feels, which prevents him from fully living and
Read more on polygon.com
