Movie Review: The Beast

3.5 stars out of 5

I didn’t know much about The Beast going into this: Léa Seydoux (I’m a fan) time-travels, and keeps meeting the same man. I was hoping — and even told the concessions staffer — that the movie would be more weird than romantic. I think I got what I wanted.

Just a little more plot for y’all: It’s 2044, and AI has taken most of our jobs. Dang! Ah, but there’s a medical procedure in which humans can go through their past lives, cleanse the heavy emotions, and return to the present without feelings but ready for one of the good remaining jobs.

First we’re in 1910 and everyone’s in old-timey clothes and hair and we’re in a fancy house at a party and sometimes they’re speaking French and why is this segment going on for so long and oh man I am getting sleeeeeeeeepy…. Reader, I do not care for this era of “period piece” and will admit to dozing off a time or two or maybe even three, possibly missing a detail here and there. Yet I snapped to attention when things indeed got weird for Gabrielle (Seydoux) before she zapped back to the present, which was the future.

There’s a strong David Lynch influence here, specifically the Lost Highway/Mulholland Drive era, and Seydoux could easily be a stand-in for Naomi Watts. But director/co-writer Bertrand Bonello is no David Lynch, and I began to wonder if things were just getting weird for weirdness’s sake. Why aren’t Gabrielle’s past lives more commonplace? It’s the cliché of tales of regression, where the person was a fighter pilot and a princess and the inventor of fire, yet never learns that in a past life they were the guy at CVS who unlocks the razor case.

So, I don’t know, it’s pretty cool, and the always watchable Seydoux fully commits to the role, though there’s a slight undercurrent of dumb and it just doesn’t quite come together. You can certainly wait till this one is streaming. Oh, no plot spoilers, but there was one element that I absolutely had never seen before in all my years of moviegoing: Instead of end credits, there was a QR code on-screen! So later I watched 8 minutes of credits on my phone. Wow, we really are in the future!