Let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, that one can distill one’s life to a series of individual choices. Mundane ones, to start: today’s outfit, this evening’s dinner, tomorrow’s commute. Those decisions are quotidian, even bland or mindless; perhaps they are the result of living in one’s society. Then there are the complications, the weightier selections: the decision to uproot one’s life, to fall in love, to leave someone behind. What complicates any decision, then, is the fear of the wrong move, the anxiety that we will elect a route that leads to failure or harm. We might choose a different path—an inoffensive shirt, a simplistic dinner, an uncomplicated romance—if we anticipate such imperfect thinking would inflict violence upon our lives or those around us.

That one’s emotions are pesky, volatile, fickle—distinctly human, and therefore a threat—is the premise of The Beast, or La Bête, a 2023 historical and sci-fi thriller that made its debut on the Criterion Channel with a live screening on July 28. The film, directed with reserve and punctured with slow-growing suspense by Bertrand Bonello, will be available to stream on Criterion Aug. 1, 2024.

The year is 2044. Artificial Intelligence has since made human workers pointless. In particular, humans’ emotion-driven decision-making relegates them to working dull jobs, such as checking the temperatures of data plates, or what appear to be large burnished amber rectangles of few distinct features. Such is the job Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux) seeks to escape at the film’s inception. She chooses to undergo a common procedure to eschew her human emotions, and therefore to obtain a higher-ranked job, known as a “purification” process. Laying in a pool of what looks like black gloop, Gabrielle must revisit her past lives and forgo the traumatic burden of the individuals she was before. If successful in viewing these memories without emotion, she may obtain a job she wants: where she can be “useful,” in her words.

Spurred by this intriguing premise, The Beast excels best in the first iteration of Gabrielle’s purification “surgery,” in which she peruses her life as a pianist and doll factory owner in France, 1910. In every lifetime, she encounters Louis Lewanski (George MacKay), this year at a party—a baroque, enchanting setting where the pair’s obvious attraction is immediate, even if Gabrielle has a husband, Georges (Martin Scali), with whom she operates the doll factory. We care little that Georges exists, really, for his and Gabrielle’s relationship fails to parallel the magnetism that Seydoux and MacKay affect as lovers. The actors transmute every innocuous interaction into an intimate moment: a desire for crepes with jam is a joyful shared adventure, a locked glance grows charged with affection, and a handhold becomes unbearably tender. 

Their dialogue, too, projects this burning intimacy. By their first meeting on screen, we learn the two had met years before, but their former encounter isn’t the reason for their affinity, rather a prelude to their veracious link: that, in their previous meeting, Gabrielle confessed to Louis a lifelong fear that an impending catastrophe will “obliterate” her life. She named it something “strange, rare, and terrible,” he recalls her saying, a characterization inspired by Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle.

This fear explains Gabrielle’s resistance to a true affair with Louis in 1910: the fear of triggering that annihilating force. But so too does it underline 2044’s Gabrielle’s enduring need to find Louis—her soulmate, if you wish—as she revisits their lives together and, later, reconnects with him in their disjointed and dreary dystopian world. These themes ground the film through its jarring, abstract, or nonlinear moments—such as repeated scenes, imagined trysts, or screen-melting visual effects—which ring out like untuned keys in an aging piano that, rather than blight a song into incoherence, render the tune distinct and eerie.

Shepherding ahead to 2014 in Los Angeles, the film chills without Seydoux and MacKay together on screen as frequently as they were in 1910s France. Here, an agitated Louis films his bitter rants against women who won’t sleep with him and stalks aspiring model Gabrielle, who housesits for a wealthy client. MacKay makes a surprisingly convincing and pitiful incel to contrast his 1910’s lovesick and devoted self. Seydoux, meanwhile, continues to command the film’s attention with a gentle vulnerability that peers through her character’s cool persona. 

Compelling, too, is the film’s enduring doll imagery, from the attentive shots of a perfected factory assembly in 1910 to the doll-like model lineup that 2014’s Gabrielle takes part in, to later an AI-doll, Kelly (Guslagie Malanda), in 2044. The unsettling blank stare of each doll emphasizes, if overtly, how profitable and preferable the absence of emotions can be for the individual in these worlds. Bonello’s screenplay is precise, if also fantastical and delightfully abstract, aided by Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit in an adaptation that commands new and timely life into James’s story. To match, the score alternates between lashes of serrated electronic sounds and classical music, which imbue each scene with the thrill of approaching disaster, even in moments of otherwise ease. Still, the modern sequences in Los Angeles fail to offer the ebullience of the 1910 love affair—and the intriguing consequences of Gabrielle’s choice to purify in 2044—both in its comparatively uninteresting cityscape and lesser characterization. Other characters’ repeated dialogue, appears to exist to reflect Gabrielle’s and Louis’s generational coexistence, but instead emerges conspicuously rote and robotic.

Meanwhile, the beast lurks, a force made invisible only because it runs faster ahead of us as we chase it down the labyrinth. In tone, The Beast relies skillfully on this mystery. Much like Gabrielle’s and Louis’s opening conversation invites an instability to their interwoven lives, so too do we feel that impending dread permeate the narrative of the film. We crawl hungrily toward a supposed obliteration or annihilation—and await that strange, rare, and terrible truth—with the same anticipation and fear that the characters experience. We yearn to name this beast among the shadows—until it perches behind a turn in the path and grabs us by the throat as we hurtle speedily into its claws. 

Review Courtesy of Arleigh Rodgers

Feature Image Credit to Les Films du Belier via IMDb