The Beast(2023) Bertrand Bonello

Bertrand Bonello's cinema has always been characterized by being eclectic and often cryptic. They are not exactly easy works and, in this case at hand, The Beast is a very strange and difficult film to follow. But if we accept the director's challenge and let ourselves be carried away by his complex and meandering story, in the style of David Lynch in Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001), we will realize that we are facing a great film that mixes the genres of science fiction and melodrama like few others. In The Beast, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is a woman who wants to eliminate any trace of emotion from her DNA to get rid of unhappiness and improve her productivity. We are in a dehumanized future in which artificial intelligence dominates the world. For the process to have the desired result, Gabrielle will have to travel to her past lives located in 1910, 2014 and 2044. In them she will repeatedly encounter her impossible love, Louis (George MacKay), presented on all three occasions as a threat more than as the ideal of romantic love. The film will jump from one era to another looking for connections and echoes in the relationship of the two characters, destined for a tragic outcome. Perhaps the most conventional story here is the one set in 1910, in the Parisian belle époque, in which Gabrielle is a famous pianist who attracts the admiration and desire of the young Louis. She is married and the temptation of infidelity…