The Beast is the purest science fiction experience a movie can offer

12.10.2023 - 19:05 / polygon.com

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 embracing romance until it’s far too late. There have been several movie versions over the past decade — a Brazilian one in 2017, a Dutch one in 2019, and an Austrian one released earlier in 2023, which transposes the story’s setting to a nightclub between 1979 and 2004. But rather than copying the core premise of the short story, Bonello’s French- and English-language adaptation uses James’ dense, descriptive prose to weave detailed textures and sensations in each of his timelines.

While the movie’s three settings are nominally connected by the lives Gabrielle has lived, The Beast isn’t concerned with the hows and whys of reincarnation and recollection across time. Instead, it takes a distinctly Bollywood approach to rebirth: So long as the same actors play each version of the character, Bonello assumes the audience will project the necessary connections onto them.

That sense of projection is vital to The Beast, a film whose emotional impact depends on what you bring to it. But the