The best thing I can say about Michael Pearce’s Beast (in a movie that is rife with good things) is that I can’t think of a movie where an unknown director directing his first feature-length film (Pearce), an unknown lead actress, starring in her first film (Jessie Buckley) and an unknown lead actor, starring in, really his first film (Johnny Flynn – Love Is Thicker Than Water) have excelled more. The direction is purposeful, stylistic, and detailed. At the same time, the performances between the leads are combustible. The story is rich enough to carry you from the starting line to the checkered flag in a movie that ultimately failed to live up to its initial promise, due mostly to errors in editing and an overall storyline that might have been a tad ambitious for this novice in their craft. It’s a difficult movie to recommend if you’re not a hardcore independent movie film buff. But, if, like me, you try to watch anything that comes close to looking like an intense, original, emotional drama, this movie will fill that need. And even if you leave feeling a little unsatisfied, you’ll leave knowing that the director and both leads left everything they had on the floor. If nothing else, it’ll encourage you to look for future films that any of these three people might be involved with.
Set on the tiny island of Jersey off the British south coast in the English Channel comes the story of Moll (Buckley), a sometimes proper, insecure wallflower whose enigmatic, sometimes sinister ways make her truly difficult to pinpoint throughout the course of the movie and the equally mysterious Pascal (Flynn). A relative unknown on an island that seems to know a little bit about every other person on the island, but maybe not the intricate details of their everyday life, Pascal comes to the aid of Moll after she is out drinking and dancing at the bars on the night of her birthday. There was a family barbecue that she grew bored of and, despite knowing that there is a killer on the island (three young girls have been kidnapped and found in shallow graves in the last four years and a fourth remains missing), she heads to a local bar where she and a boy named Leigh (Charley Palmer Rothwell – Darkest Hour) drink and dance the night away. Early the next morning (the two did not sleep that night), his sexual overtures are unwelcome. On an isolated rockface where Moll resists his crude advances and just before it starts to get potentially ugly, Pascal appears and chases Leigh off with his hunting rifle. This moment is significant because of what happens but also because of when it happens and where it happens. The fact there are only three people there to tell this story plays a critical role in how this movie plays out.
The chemistry between Moll and Pascal is instantaneous. He tells her she is wounded (she has a cut on her hand), and he can help. She barely hesitates in following him down the mountain to his truck. She invites him over to her house to do some odd jobs and continues to grow closer to him, even though he is a person of interest in the ongoing investigation of the missing girl. She can’t help herself. She is enthralled by his confidence, his masculinity, and his allure. He is rough, tough, and crude, but there are elements to him that are soft and sensitive. There is much to be made of the symbolism in Beast as well. Introduced to us in the first scene as the proper girl next door, Moll shows us that she is not the modest young lady her family would like her to be. After their first sexual experience, she comes home covered in dirt and spreads herself out with her legs wide apart on her mother’s spotless white couch. Breathing heavily as if the act had just occurred, Moll very much displays a pose of someone who might be described as a sexual deviant.
Clifford (Trystan Gravelle – television’s Mr. Selfridge) is Moll’s brother and is a police detective on the island of Jersey. He shows her a confidential police report of Pascal, hoping that she’ll stay away from him. Much like their terrifyingly protective mother Hilary (Geraldine James – 45 Years, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Clifford tries to oppressively hold Moll back from building her own life after a traumatizing violent event during her teenage years that saw her stab another girl in the chest. Recurring dreams of this event continue to haunt Moll to this day, and we are told of this event for a reason. It plays into her psyche and her actions for sure. From Clifford, we learn that Pascal has been a suspect in each of the previous killings but that his story always checked out. Clifford tells him that he did serve time in prison for having a relationship with a 14-year-old girl that Pascal later says was consensual and that it was her parents who pressed the charges against him because they didn’t like him. Enough mystery to keep you guessing? Absolutely. And, what intrigues Moll most about Pascal is also what terrifies her the most. It is the potential danger hiding behind those unwavering eyes, cordial smile, and scraggly blond locks. Most of the locals in the town suspect Pascal of being the serial killer, based upon his troubled past, but this does nothing but intensifies her pent-up sexual desires and enraged impulses. Moll cannot resist Pascal, regardless of what may happen to her. Their relationship is like the one you’ve seen hundreds of times on film, but also like the one you haven’t seen at all. It’s all-encompassing, and you can’t turn away the deeper and more involved entangled they become in each other’s lives and stories.
That’s the good of the movie. The bad is the story’s unevenness in its third act. Honestly, it feels like a completely different movie. The unresolved murders become a byproduct at best. We get away from the mystery and, instead, we follow the path of these tortured lovers. Is Pascal truly innocent? Or, is Moll willing to accept him as he is if he is the killer? Moll’s inner struggle with these questions isn’t nearly as clearly defined as it should, favoring Moll’s own teetering grip on reality. As a result, we are as perplexed by her own story as we are by Pascal’s. She becomes an unreliable narrator. As mentioned, I think Pearce was a little ambitious with what he was trying to do. If he simplified some of the stories or had some editors do this for him, we wouldn’t have felt like we were watching two different movies. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in storytelling. You can’t just take a story in a complete direction without reason just because you feel like it. It’s how I felt when we hit the third act of Tully. I was so upset with the turn that Jason Reitman made with this movie until it came together in an unexpected, profound, and ultimately satisfying way. We didn’t have that with Beast. There were elements of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in this movie, and that’s not what I was looking for as this grim movie tried to wrap itself up. There are too many moving parts introduced, and when they start to spin out of control, Pearce has no means to reel them back in. Again, it’s a knock on a movie that did a lot of things well. But, at the same time, it’s a big knock. Even as we speed towards the end with a few false finishes, we don’t get much resolution. Is it okay to get away with this when you are dangling a protagonist who has a troubled past and is dealing with mental issues of her own? I don’t think so. I feel like that’s cheap, and it leaves us feeling cheated.
Beast has both promise and ambition. No one will argue that. Its key players all brought the heat. But a lack of a cohesive story and consistent actions among its key figures dooms its third act and leaves you desiring more. I appreciated the uniqueness and the subtleness displayed by Pearce, but it’s not enough to edge me away from a conclusion that fell of the rails by failing to obey genre rules. But it did do enough correctly to warrant a pretty good score.
Plot 9/10
Character Development 8/10
Character Chemistry 9/10
Acting 9/10
Screenplay 7/10
Directing 7.5/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 9.5/10
Universal Relevance 7/10
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