Janus Contemporaries’s newest unnumbered entry into the Criterion Collection is priced just right at $20.99. The Beast, the latest film from Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance; Saint Laurent), is a surreal tale starring two of the best actors working today, Léa Seydoux (One Fine Morning; Crimes of the Future) and George MacKay (1917; The End). The disc comes with one bonus feature, a classic Criterion zine, the trailer, and the 2 hour 26 minute film. But it’s worth every penny, because The Beast is one of the best films of 2024, and it isn’t trying to milk your wallet off the Criterion reputation. It has its own.
“The shadow of the Beast will appear there”
I’ve written before about how the term “Lynchian” is often mis-applied to sell a friend on watching a surreal film, more than describing anything other than the works of David Lynch (Eraserhead; Twin Peaks: The Return), whose surreality is irrevocably tied to the great American dissonance. The more universal branch of reality Lynch subverts is the one he shares with Nobuhiko Obayashi (House; The Little Girl Who Conquered Time), a vein of hand-made abstraction at odds with the nature of cameras themselves. This is the surreality of The Beast which earned itself the Lynchian reputation out of Cannes.
L-R: Léa Seydoux and Georgie MacKay in Bertrand Bonnello’s 2024 surreal sci-fi horror film THE BEAST. Image courtesy of Janus Films and The Criterion Collection.
Bonnello clearly loves Lynch and plays with the iconography. In one sequence, he styles Seydoux like Naomi Watts (Book of Henry) in Mulholland Drive (2001), and the film could be described as a formalist modern update to Inland Empire (2006). Instead of only a crunchy, digital look, this film shoots on 35 mm, modern digital cinema, cell phones, and in-world cameras, all of which look great on Blu-ray. There’s still a woman in trouble, but now she’s trying to act in a green screen studio, another false reality. She’s also a job-seeker in the post-climate-apocalypse, beholden to AI oligarchs who see her emotions as bad for business. And she’s a 20th century pianist considering a marital affair. All of these Seydouxes are marked by the fear of a great disaster awaiting them. But they are not alone. They are joined by a man played by George MacKay (1917; The End).
“You remember don’t you…that we met before”
A great actor on the rise, George MacKay’s run of award-winning theatrical films, 1917 (2018), The Beast, and The End (2024), give him some definition as a leading man on the edges of disaster. Here, he plays a prospective affair partner, a fellow job-seeker, and an incel. This incel, Louis Loanski, 30-year-old virgin, is one of the finest cinematic inventions of the 21st century, hyperbole and all. If there is a weakness in The Beast, it’s that I want it to be about him. Instead, he is a hilarious, moving, and troubling instrument in a six-piece band singing about certainty.
“There must be beautiful things in this chaos.”
In the single extra feature, “Meet the Filmmakers,” Bonello summarizes his body of work as being about freedom, and this film has a unique angle on it. This is not an age of misinformation or the death of the authority. This is an age of decaying certainty. What MacKay does to elevate the character of Louis Loanksi beyond the real incel he was inspired by is lay bare the road from uncertainty to resentment. There is hilarity and pathos there in equal measure. When we feel certain, we feel secure, even if we are certain that we’re in a bad spot. Seydoux’s star person is that of a woman of affairs, one of the most uncertain things we can do. The modern job hunt is already supercharged with uncertainty as we try and make ourselves look good to the AI-based screening apps and chat-GPT summaries between our human selves and the recruiters we also have to change ourselves to please. No post-apocalypse required.
George MacKay in Bertrand Bonnello’s 2024 surreal sci-fi horror film THE BEAST. Image courtesy of Janus Films and The Criterion Collection.
Whether they have a beating heart or a throttled AWS (Amazon Web Service) server, the oligarch wants us to forget our anger, the logical response to a certain feeling of mistreatment. The Beast is one of the year’s best films because it breaks reality to remind us of this one: feeling bad and feeling good are equally essential parts of the human experience, and understanding how to process our feelings, how to find certainty, is how we can all live freer lives. The Beast hits the streets December 10th, 2024.
The Beast Special Features:
- Meet the Filmmakers, a new interview with director Bertrand Bonello
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
Available on Blu-ray and DVD December 10th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official The Criterion Collection The Beast webpage.
Final Score: 5 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
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