Although we can tell early in the film that we are being presented with multiple timelines, dating them proves more difficult than it initially seems.
The opening scene takes place at a party where the well-heeled guests are wearing attire consistent with the first decade of the twentieth century.
Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), an acclaimed concert pianist, reconnects with Louis (George Mackay), a man she met a number of years before in Italy. Their initial conversation distils the opening pages of Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, which inspired the film.
Although the two characters were only together briefly during their previous encounter, Gabrielle told Louis a secret about herself that she had shared with no one else: She suffers from a debilitating fear that something terrible will happen to her.
Soon, this party scene gives way to a futuristic scenario, in which Gabrielle is applying for a job that will require her to undergo a medical procedure designed to counteract the impact of inherited trauma.
When the film cuts back to the early twentieth-century setting, we witness a conversation between Gabrielle and Louis about a piece that she is practising by Arnold Schönberg. She explains that the piece’s apparent lack of sentiment poses a challenge because she can’t feel her way into the music. Louis declares his belief that it is possible to experience emotions without recourse to sentimentality.
This conversation casts a long shadow over the remainder of The Beast, though it takes a while for that to become apparent.
At this early stage in the narrative, members of the audience who know their history well are likely to anticipate an allegory about the years leading up to the First World War, in which the aesthetic rupture of early Modernism prefigures the collapse of the old world order.
But it soon becomes clear that we are in a different timeline altogether.
The war is never mentioned. Instead, London and Paris are experiencing the sort of cataclysmic flooding predicted for the mid-2000s after climate change has melted the polar ice caps.
Nevertheless, someone familiar with Sigmund Freud’s landmark book Beyond the Pleasure Principle will perceive a connection with our own timeline since it was the shell shock suffered by soldiers on the battlefields of Europe that motivated him to develop his theory of the compulsion to repeat.
Not to mention that one of the foundational premises of psychoanalysis is that establishing the correct order of events is crucial.
Because The Beast jumps back and forth between the early twentieth century and the mid-twenty-first century, then adds a third timeline set in 2014 halfway through the film, it presents us with precisely the sort of temporal disorder that Freud’s talking cure was intended to remedy.
Near the beginning of James’s novella, the protagonist Marcher, who correlates with Gabrielle in the film’s opening scene, recognises the face of a woman but can recall little else: “It affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but didn’t know what it continued.”
This sense of pregnant anteriority shapes the tale that follows. Marcher’s connection with that woman, May Bartram, depends on the secret he has confided in her, his premonition of a doom to come. The farther we get into the novella, however, the more we suspect that his fear of the future prevents him from comprehending the past.
Instead of perceiving that a door had opened during his first conversation with May, one which could have let love enter his life, he focuses his energy on keeping the door to his future shut.
In the end, this failure of perception turns out to be that “beast in the jungle” he has spent his life dreading.
Although Bonello’s film starts more or less where the novella does, it ultimately heads in a different direction.
Gabrielle recognises when the door to love opens in each of The Beast’s three timelines. And something inside her resists the reprogramming that would shut that door for good.
When she meets Louis for the last time, she tells him, “I don’t know where to begin.”
“So start at the end,” he replies. But it rapidly becomes apparent that the new beginning Louis has in mind is incompatible with her desire.
Gabrielle does not want to start over, freed from the burden of the past.
On the contrary, she clearly believes that the suffering she has experienced is an integral part of her character. Without it, she would lose touch with her humanity, effectively transforming into a robot.
When she undergoes the purification process earlier in the film, it does not work the way it should.
Instead of pursuing her desires with the replicant-level automaton sent home to nurse her, she repudiates its artificiality. No matter how much like a human it may seem, it will never be more than a highly sophisticated doll.
All three of The Beast’s timelines include scenes worthy of a horror film. But the one set in 2014 is the most disturbing.
Based on the true story of Elliot Rodger, the self-described “incel” who went on a killing spree near Santa Barbara, California in 2014, it confronts us with a version of Louis who actually does seem to be the beast that Gabrielle has feared.
The narrative becomes even more fractured and repetitive at the end of that timeline, suggesting that Bonello wants to make a point analogous to the famous story of the boy who plays “fort-da” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Unfortunately, this portion of the film feels both too long and too rushed.
Had a closer parallel been made between the minor earthquake that takes place in that timeline with the inexplicably catastrophic flooding in the early twentieth-century timeline, The Beast would have been a stronger film.
It’s still a satisfying experience, though.
The Beast communicates the message that our anxiety about the future is bound up with a failure to perceive what dangers lie in the past.
This is doubly true.
On the one hand, we must acknowledge the ways in which, to invoke American William Faulkner’s formulation, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past”. In other words, we inhabit the present perfect, where deeds keep piling up to impede our doings.
On the other hand, we face the disturbing prospect that what seems done might one day come undone, returning from the oblivion to which it had been consigned to trouble the future.
Although The Beast avoids explicit references to politics, it is hard not to respond to its fractured timelines in terms of the reactionary extremism surging throughout the developed world.
The film’s preoccupation with AI reinforces this connection.
If AI represents the future, it is one cobbled together from the past. Its apparent novelty derives from the manner of its collaging, not the material used in the process.
To make matters worse, that material is indiscriminately sourced. Quantity takes precedence over quality.
Furthermore, since that material was produced by human beings and is typically redeployed without compensating or even acknowledging its creators, this future appears to us like the revenant in a fun-house mirror.
We see ourselves in AI, only in a distorted form that reminds us of our own powerlessness.
When Gabrielle begins the purification process, she does so out of desperation because the job she holds is so boring. She never believes the hype.
By the time we reach the end of the film, she recognises that the diminishment of affect facilitated by AI will come at the expense of her humanity.
The Beast is a difficult film to analyze. It is a deliberately confusing story about confusion. But the problems it raises are far more interesting to explore than any solutions it might propose.
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Screenshot courtesy of IGN Movie Trailers. All rights reserved.
