In The Stranger‘s SIFF Notes 2018 capsule review of Beast, Carl Spence wrote that the aesthetic language of Michael Pearce’s Beast “recalls the works of Jane Campion [Top of the Lake] and Lynne Ramsay [Morvern Callar, Ratcatcher, We Need to Talk about Kevin] to create an intoxicating psychosexual journey.”
I just wanted to pop in and say I saw the film last night, along with a sold-out house at the Ark Lodge Cinema in Columbia City, and wholeheartedly second the recommendation. If you’re on or near any kind of fence, I’d urge you to go check out the film’s second (and likely final) screening tonight at 9:30pm at Pacific Place. (Though my own aesthetic language tends not to include the word “psychosexual,” both constituent halves of that portmanteau are definitely in effect.)
It’s a tense, suspenseful thriller set on the remote English Channel Island of Jersey where Moll (Jessie Buckley), a woman in her 20s, lives a cloistered life with her family, presided over by her controlling, disapproving mother. Moll is a bit of a Cinderella—she lives at home to help take care of her father (who appears to be sliding toward dementia), her mother judges her every move, and she’s even overshadowed at her birthday party.
But Moll’s lowly condition isn’t a matter of simple benign neglect. There’s something sinister in her past—something dark and “wild”—that her family won’t let her live down, even as they perform concern for her. To make matters worse, her sister is married to a cop, and another cop has an unwelcome crush on her. She appears to be, or at least feel, as though she’s under constant surveillance, so she constructs a well-polished, dutiful surface—good for the country club or the church choir—and then retreats from it, inwardly. The pressure caused by all this tectonic grinding roils behind the fake smiles she rehearses in the mirror, threatening to explode.
Which it does soon after she meets Pascal (Johnny Flynn), an almost feral Island resident with a scarred-up face who makes his living poaching rabbits and working with his gnarly hands. Their romance is occasioned by violence, and the passion that magnetizes them—despite her family’s aggressive hostility towards the déclassé Pascal—is itself violent, though it’s also profound and sincere.
Which is why the news that a psychopath is loose on the small island, abducting, torturing, and killing young girls, and that Pascal is a suspect, complicates everything. Is the suspicion predicated on the colonial class bias against him, or is there real evidence? Should Moll’s response be to fall in line with the bulls in her family, or to take a stand for the man she has fallen in love with? To whom should she be true—and does she even know how, given that she can’t even manage to be true to herself?
Though the suspense of the plot is well-addressed by the film’s genre bona fides, the real meat of Beast consists of its willingness to delve into the dark corners of Moll’s inner life, which is a truly tempestuous world, very convincingly evoked by Jessie Buckley’s startling lead performance. Beset on all sides by predators and prison guards, Moll appears to be clinging to the only respite available to her: interiority. But as the pressures of love, sexuality, accountability, and conflict mount, it becomes increasingly difficult for her true self to remain submerged.
The results of its coming up for air are the stuff of a dark, intense thriller that’s worth changing your plans for.
