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 works by a director — the maker of Nocturama and Saint Laurent — long preoccupied with dread, beauty and the way technology reshapes the self. The France–Canada co-production reunited Bonello 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 where 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 celluloid textures and digital cool, while the structure folds the timelines into one another, building a mood of beautiful, sustained unease. The film is as much an essay on premonition and the fear of love as it is science fiction.

Critics were divided in the way Bonello's work tends to divide — but the admiration ran deep, and the film was quickly inducted into the Criterion Collection. Reviewers singled out Seydoux's performance, which holds the film's fractured chronology together, and the picture's eerie prescience about AI and emotional automation. It stands as one of the boldest European films of its year, a melancholy meditation dressed in the clothes of genre.