None of Us Know the Future. ‘The Beast’ Taps Into that Fear
It’s not the first film to probe the uneasy relationship between humanity and tech, but it could be the most poetic and mysterious.
There’s a key point during The Beast when, stuck for words, the main character tells her companion “I don’t know where to begin.” The reply? “So start at the end.” Good advice!
Happily, we can do that here spoiler-free. The Beast ends where it begins: in a near future (2044) where AI has taken over two-thirds of the workforce. Those pesky human traits like “biases” and “emotions” kept getting in the way, see. It’s left young adults like Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux, Dune) and Louis (George MacKay, 1917) feeling disaffected and aimless.
But there’s a solution: a DNA-altering process called “purification”. It promises to rid people of their emotional traumas, and level up their career. Where do we sign?!
The minor surgery would be simple and painless — just a robotic needle into the ear canal, no big deal — but Gabrielle has her doubts. Since she was young, she’s had a crippling fear. She describes it as “a deep-seated feeling that something terrible will occur… like a hidden beast, waiting to pounce.” Could this DNA-cleaning be the unknown horror she’s always dreaded?
There’s a few keys to unlocking The Beast. The French-Canadian co-production takes place across three eras — 1910, 2014 and 2044 — and jumps between timelines a LOT. The best way to keep track? Like in Challengers, keep your eye on Seydoux’s hairstyle. The other helpful clue is knowing that the film’s concept was inspired by The Beast in the Jungle; a 1903 novella by Henry James about a man who — you guessed it — awaits a catastrophe that never comes.
That 30-page story ponders the wastefulness of a life lived in fear. For his 150-minute film, director Bertrand Bonello levels up those themes — sharpening them to a sizzling point like sunlight through a 2024 lens. Do we all, deep down, share a primal anxiety about the future? We’re increasingly detached as a society — so how do we define connection? And could our impending technologies reshape our ideas of “existence” in existentially frightening ways?
How does The Beast tackle anxiety?
Like we mentioned, this isn’t a linear story. Each era features a new version of Gabrielle and Louis, and Bonello plaits the three timelines together; like a rope, it creates a stronger emotional thread. It’s also no coincidence that this displacement in time gives us a certain unease. Call it the way of The Beast. It helps put us inside Gabrielle’s anxious mindset — an overarching inner theme that runs through all three of her character’s iterations.
In 2044, she’s unfulfilled with her monotonous job; the purification could be her answer, but she’s inexplicably resistant. Even after being reassured she has nothing to lose, Gabrielle responds, “But I could lose everything.” Like many sufferers, Gabrielle’s anxiety manifests as a crippling fear of negative outcomes (it’s a low-key reminder of the famed Lao Tzu quote: “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future.”)
It’s no spoiler to say that Gabrielle takes the needle. As the procedure begins to “clean away” her past traumas, it also unlocks memories of two of her past lives, lived a century apart (are they literal or metaphorical? That’s left up to you). In 1910, a happily married Gabrielle meets and is immediately drawn to the gentle and refined Louis at a Parisian soirée. He claims they’ve met before, in fact — when she confided a strange secret in him. That a “hidden beast” was coming to destroy her and everyone around her.
It might’ve been the best language a well-heeled Frenchwoman had at her disposal at a time when the medical field was still coming to define anxiety. Bonello deliberately sets this section in 1910 for another reason: to coincide with the real-life Great Flood of Paris, when the Seine, swollen by winter rains, rose eight metres and caused catastrophic flooding. It leads to a key scene where Gabrielle is trapped in her husband’s flooded, burning factory. Again, it’s not an accident. Anxiety sufferers often describe their experience as though they’re drowning.
In the 2014 timeline, Gabrielle is an actress & model — just one among thousands in Hollywood dreaming of more. In one scene, she’s among a literal lineup of women dressed in identical lingerie for a photoshoot casting. Bonello uses physical and negative space in this era to represent Gabrielle’s anxiousness and displacement: she’s a foreigner, she’s housesitting, she lives alone. The shrill alarm of the modern, unfamiliar house serves to further physicalise her anxieties; so does a sudden L.A. earthquake. It leads her, frazzled, onto the street, where again she meets Louis — and again, she’s drawn to him like they’re already lovers.
What does The Beast have to say about human connection?
Along with his co-writers Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit, director Bertrand Bonello focuses on this recurring connection between Gabrielle and Louis. The filmmakers’ goal is to underline the importance of love, the innate feeling of safety it brings, and to prompt us to question whether technology might be gradually eroding those human values.
Despite being strangers each time they meet, Gabrielle & Louis are kindred spirits; somehow, their souls feel enmeshed. Yet in every era, there’s a form of technology that conspires to drive them apart. For example, in 1910, it’s a new but highly flammable product that leads to the factory disaster. In 2044, it’s the purification procedure that has them at odds. Louis has no qualms about going ahead, and seems baffled by Gabrielle’s hesitancy. This echoes the real life behaviours of non-anxious partners who can’t relate to their partner’s state of mind.
We feel it most keenly, though, in the 2014 timeline, where Louis is a YouTube content creator on a journey of self-discovery. We see his videos full screen, and watch with growing alarm as Louis confidently rants about pretty girls who refuse to date him, who won’t even talk to him. When Louis bitterly admits he’s a virgin (despite being “well spoken, and dressing real nice”), he vows to take revenge on the next pretty girl he meets. It’s a clear nod to the rise of incel culture. In this era, it’s the lack of connection that’s being weaponised.
When they meet on the street post-earthquake, Gabrielle is so intrigued by Louis, she invites him home. A rash choice? Or understandable for a lonely, foreign housesitter? A beautiful woman seducing him is everything Louis SAYS he ever wanted, so it’s startling when he not only refuses, but warns her — BEGS her — to leave him alone. Having built a loyal incel following, Louis can’t “break character” now; can’t turn back on his public plan. He’s planning to hurt a woman — but for reasons he can’t explain, he doesn’t want that woman to be Gabrielle.
How does The Beast explore the dehumanisation of tech?
After a seismic shift in global labour, AI carries out most jobs in 2044 — achieving company goals responsibly and fairly. But as Gabrielle icily points out, “ how is 67% unemployment fair?” The digital revolution has created the bleakest of ironies: with strong emotions deemed unsuitable for stable job performance, humans now do the drudge work.
Hence, purification. It’s so commonplace, everybody’s doing it; a simple tech enhancement, the way we’d think about getting a FitBit or an Oura Ring. Bonello also makes sure we realise it’s a clear allegory for traditional psychotherapy. As a doctor describes the process to Gabrielle, “We review what’s damaged you for centuries and get rid of it. “ Yikes. In the future, will we replace even our therapists with needles, ones and zeroes?
The “dehumanisation of tech” theme is sharpest in these future-set scenes, when it’s hinted that purification might zap away a bit more than trauma. Do people really come out the same as before, or are they a bit… robotic? As someone who’s held her breath for a lifetime, it taps into Gabrielle’s deepest fear. Can’t say we blame her. Is there a more existentially terrifying thought than waking up devoid of emotions — the very quality that makes us human?
The workforce is resolutely analogue back in 1910, of course, but it’s worth mentioning what Gabrielle’s husband’s factory makes: children’s dolls. Peach-coloured bodies, assembled on a production line, with rows upon rows of expressionless, identical faces. It’s a neat visual echo of the future The Beast is warning us about. Stripped of our personalities, suppressing what makes us unique, we’d no longer be individuals — just nameless, interchangeable bodies.
In 2014, the nods are more subtle. At work, Gabrielle performs within a giant greenscreen studio — she’s literally adrift in the void, ready for technology to fill in the world around her. After hours, she housesits for an unseen mogul who calls her at all hours whenever his remote system alerts him to something wrong with his home (talk about Big Brother).
It’s a sleek glass tech retreat, “protected” by a high-tech alarm with security monitors that Gabrielle eyes constantly. But when Louis attempts to get closer to Gabrielle — dangerously close — all those codes and sensors turn out to be fallible. The lesson? Technology might offer us the illusion of security, but it can’t guarantee to keep us safe.
So what’s the takeaway from The Beast?
How you respond to The Beast might hinge on which of the film’s three eras you connect with best. Francophiles and lovers of fine costume drama will lap up the glossy and refined 1910 section. The 2014 story has a razor-wire intensity worthy of a David Fincher thriller. And the future-set era is different again; coolly-mannered, dreamlike, nearly Scandinavian in its tone.
But the common thread is Gabrielle. Her palpable and convincing extremes of emotion — from her gut-churning existential fear, to her feel-it-in-my-marrow love for Louis — will keep you transfixed (if it doesn’t, check your heartbeat). Brought to life by a spectacular Léa Seydoux, her performance fills The Beast near to bursting like a hot air balloon.
Partnered with MacKay, the three stories of Gabrielle and Louis interlink to create a film that could’ve been, simply, a telling of passion through the ages. But instead, Bonello has given us somewhat of a future body horror. With its notions of love and “erasure”, you could say it’s Romeo & Juliet meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind… all reflected by a Black Mirror.
The Beast seems to beg us, collectively, not to fall down the digital rabbit hole. Could society really get to a point where we allow the magnetic allure of tech to dehumanise us beyond recognition? The cynical among us might point to the nearest Gen Z — scrolling glassy-eyed through an infinite stream of TikToks — and say it’s already here.
The more upbeat reading, though, is that the “we’re all doomed!” warning shots don’t always come to pass. Yes, The Beast is a cautionary tale. A worst-case scenario we humans — little danger-attuned bunnies that we are — can’t help but imagine. But as Henry James pointed out over a century ago, there IS something worse than being swallowed by a frightening unknown: a life spent dreading a beast that never arrives.
Originally published at https://good.film.
