The Beast

Bertrand Bonello's The Beast (La Bête) premiered in competition at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, where it contended for the Golden Lion. Loosely adapted from Henry James's 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, it is among the most ambitious films Bonello has made. The director of Nocturama and Saint Laurent has long been preoccupied with dread, beauty and the way technology reshapes the self, and this co-production between France and Canada reunited him with Léa Seydoux after Saint Laurent.

Seydoux plays Gabrielle across three eras: belle-époque Paris, Los Angeles in the early 2010s, and a chilly mid-century future in which an AI-administered society treats deep feeling as a defect to be erased. George MacKay is Louis, the man she encounters in each life. Bonello and cinematographer Josée Deshaies move between the textures of celluloid and a cooler digital look, and the structure folds the timelines into one another until the mood is one of beautiful, sustained unease. It is science fiction, and it is also an essay on premonition and the fear of love.

Critics divided over it in the way Bonello's films usually divide them, but the admirers were passionate, and the film was soon taken into the Criterion Collection. Reviewers singled out Seydoux's performance, which holds the fractured chronology together, and the film's eerie prescience about AI and emotional automation. For us it was one of the boldest European films of its year, a melancholy work in the clothes of genre.