One of the most challenging parts of film criticism is not having already seen every movie by a director, not having read every book on the topic, or not grasping all the specific intricacies of a place from which a film can hale from. For me, it leads to an insecurity towards the voice of authority I aspire to—I like to have all the context, the history, the discussion already in my head before approaching the piece at hand. That’s an unrealistic expectation, and when I go into a work practically blind it leads to a nervousness that I’m getting the information wrong and am misreading the signals. Most recently it led me to have an unfortunate time at Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023,) having no familiarity with Bonello’s work and too much with David Lynch’s. Many have noted the similarities between the French auteur’s latest and that of the aging American master, often citing that Bonello included Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) on the most recent Sight and Sound ballot. But the buck doesn’t go much further in The Beast’s Return influence beyond some aesthetic influences. In fact, it feels Bonello is at his best picking up where Lynch’s LA Trilogy—Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Dr. (2001), Inland Empire (2006)—left off. Having such a close relationship to Lynch’s work (as I imagine Bonello does too) is leading me to be unfairly harsh towards this ambitious new French film, but at the moment it’s all that I can do as a critic.
The Beast consists of three constituent and incongruous timelines weaving in and out of each other, each starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as a doomed romantic pair, first in turn-of-the-century salon society, then in 2010s L.A. as an actress and Elliot Roger-esque incel, then finally in a perpetual post-Covid future dystopian Paris. It’s a film made of recurrence and repetition, which isn’t a bad thing in a Lynch riff—what is Lost Highway if not the same people replaying and repeating their lives in different modes of reality while unknowingly hiding from the unravelling of their psychosomatic trauma?
The Beast, however, takes this recurrence and builds it into a tale of fateful love. This may be something that a Bonello fan could tell me more about, but I find it a baffling betrayal of what Lynch has experimented with, especially the conclusions he draws in the finale of The Return, where Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost make a shocking reversal at the idea that the past trauma can be repaired without frighteningly upsetting the past itself. Not to digress too much, but there’s a rightful claim to be made in The Return as an evolution of the American film canon in how it acts as a continuation and a rebuke to the final moments The Searchers (1956), whose ending Lynch’s New Hollywood generation have wrestled with since the 1960s. The Beast isn’t an addition to the conversation, but a backstep—a toy that wishes to play with filmic matters already resolved, like putting fresh skin on a buried corpse.
The impetus of The Beast is Henry James’ novella The Beast of the Jungle, which I haven’t read, and my familiarity with James’ work comes mostly from a Frederic Jameson book that I’ve been picking up and putting down continuously over the last two months. I don’t feel like I can comment on it, but maybe the novella would be as enlightening to me as watching O Lucky Man! (1973) was for unraveling some of the more perplexing elements of Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East (2023). What I’m left with is just what’s on screen—a calculated and delicate mise-en-scene, considered performances by the stars, and expertly timed editing that makes the film seem as sterile as the hypochondriac future that bookends the film.
I can see the form at hand, but it’s not doing much beyond exercising influences and paying homage, which is a boring excuse for a movie. In a time where TV can’t do much except defibrillate tried-and-true “properties” and Lana Del Rey has Ozempic’d herself back to a 2014 skinniness, pure reputation is a tired exercise in a state of dying images. It’s a cinema of entropy. It’s why The Return, and its total destruction of the expectations laid on it, and its daringness to do something new still feels so stunningly fresh seven summers later, and perhaps even those who love it so much haven’t grasped its real artistic manifesto which calls for the abandonment of the old, of the sentimental.
I haven’t had a more sour taste in my mouth coming out of a new movie than The Beast’s ending in some time. It affirms a strange love-conquers-all, a “finding each other in any universe” mentality for the same arthouse audiences that so categorically rejected the bullshit of Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). It’s honest to go for the throat and say that The Beast doesn’t feel like anything more to me that EEAAO for people with Mulholland Dr. in their Letterboxd Top 4, or The Sweet East is Forrest Gump (1994) for people that listen to the Red Scare podcast. Yet simultaneously, I don’t want to come off as glib and discredit the impressions of people I trust who’ve had positive reactions to those works. I’ll borrow here from a recent press conferences that IndyCar golden boy, Josef Newgarden, held addressing his disqualification for his and his team’s blatant cheating at the St. Petersburg Grand Prix: “You can call me every name in the book. You can call me incompetent, call me an idiot, call me an asshole, call me, you know, stupid, whatever you wanna call me. But I'm not a liar.” Newgarden was kind of lying there—there’s no way he didn’t know he was cheating. But his emotion was genuine, and I’d like to think my dull response to The Beast can be as critically valuable as those who are moved by it.
I keep coming back to Michael Koresky’s revisiting of Southland Tales (2006) in Reverse Shot, where he concludes that he doesn’t see what everyone else is seeing, but does find a critical value in exploring that. There’s some strong work on display both behind and in front of the camera in The Beast, and the central section of the movie is so good that I wish it was a part of something else. I was floored by the way Bonello used the modernist L.A. mansion, especially the foreshadowing in camera movement, but don’t see his broken digital editing that’s obviously borrowed from “Part 8” of The Return. And it’s hard for me to see something from Lynch used to such different ends—the sequence in “Part 8” where the Woodsmen bounce and teleport in front of the convenience store feels like an effect Lynch got inspired by while messing with a Premiere timeline, and for Bonello to employ a similar effect is a technical demonstration.
I miss the playfulness, the discovery. Maybe one day I’ll be greatly rewarded by watching House of Tolerance (2011) and Nocturama (2016) as so many of my friends have, but for now I’m left feeling cold and a little annoyed. Maybe that’s the point? It seems to be with so much of the “countercultural” media that New Yorkers keep trying to convince me it is worth my time these days. But I want something new, I want to be excited. Perhaps I’m refusing to engage with something interesting—by the time the QR-code credits rolled on The Beast, I was as adverse to holding my phone up to it as I was that time a Super Bowl ad tried to get me to buy crypto. If it is something new, it feels like a scam, not something to be happy about. Maybe that’s why I find myself more obsessed with motorsports (especially messy, janky American motorsports) than ever while my interest in trying to keep up with contemporary film culture is waning (and if the interest I see on the MLB and NBA from many Film Twitter personalities is an indication, I might not be the only one)—at least there the story is evolving, and does live in a fear that it’s best days are behind it. Cinema these days is so content with living in the past.