Human emotion is now anathema to our machine overlords, suppressed by visits to “purification centers” that reduce extremes of feeling to a middle ground, via treatment that erases both past-life trauma and joys. A large needle is inserted into the ear canal, somehow smoothing over the highs and lows of memory. In this film’s worldview, past-life memories form a kind of DNA, carried over to the next incarnation.
At least, that’s how it’s said to work, in writer-director Bertrand Bonello’s audaciously trippy (and very, very loose) adaptation of “The Beast in the Jungle,” a 1903 novella by Henry James about obsession and destiny that in this telling morphs into a tale of fatalistic reincarnation. If at first you don’t succeed, live, live again.
Bonello’s film jumps between three timelines: 1910 Paris, the year of a massive flood of the Seine River; 2014 Southern California, the year a young man named Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 others in what he called “retribution” for his failure to connect with women; and the aforementioned future, in an unspecified and nondescript locale. All three stories revolve around a woman and a man: Gabrielle (Leá Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), who pop up in different guises over time, but whose interactions are all characterized by a feeling of dread that Gabrielle can’t shake.
In James’s novella, that unsettling premonition was the metaphorical beast. Here, it’s unclear whether it’s that or simply the pain of being alive, compounded by all our histories.
In the Parisian story, Louis is a debonair Englishman who sweeps Gabrielle, a pianist, off her feet behind the back of her doll-maker husband (Martin Scali). (Increasingly high-tech dolls feature prominently in each of the threads, culminating in lifelike androids.) In the California story, he’s back as a thinly veiled version of Rodger, reciting his manifesto of misogyny into the lens of his smartphone, using language lifted verbatim from the real killer’s screed. Soon Louis has targeted Gabrielle, an aspiring actress, who seems to recognize him and, against all reason, still loves him from before. In the 2044 setting, the two cross paths at a purification center, before meeting again at a dance club whose name changes nightly, depending on the year or era from which the night’s retro playlist has been curated: the 1970s one night, 1962 the next. Its red-curtained interior is presided over by a creepy, David Lynchian bartender.
That’s not the only genre reference. On a superficial level, “The Beast” puts a cocktail shaker full of cinematic tropes into a blender and hits puree. Although the film can be talky and didactic at times, Seydoux and MacKay sell the high concept, generating a real erotic charge just by touching hands. Later, an underwater scene set in Gabrielle’s husband’s flooded doll factory is gorgeously surreal. The 2014 segment builds toward a suspenseful home invasion climax, albeit one in which both main characters seem untethered to reality.
You might feel that way, too. Like tectonic plates in the earthquake that punctuates that California-set chapter, Bonello’s narrative slips and slides, making the very premise on which the movie stands — along with the two main characters — shaky ground indeed.
It’s canny of Bonello to incorporate real elements — the Great Flood of Paris, the misguided anger of the incel underground, fears of AI run amok — along with the fantastical. Sometimes, though, he’s a little too heavy-handed with symbolism: Pigeons materialize indoors throughout the story, an omen of death, we’re told. And musical references, whether in the soundtrack or the screenplay, are often too on the nose: the atonal modernism of Arnold Schoenberg; the operatic despair of “Madama Butterfly”; balanced by the swooning, borderline cheesy romanticism of Roy Orbison’s “Evergreen.”
The song is playing at the end of this strange film, a finish that comes not with traditional closing credits but with an on-screen QR code so that you can take the names home with you on your phone. Somehow, it all manages to be both confusing and compelling, romantic and cerebral. Call it bizarre, as Gabrielle says to Louis when the two find themselves in their favorite, now inexplicably empty, nightclub. Yes, it is bizarre, Louis agrees. But, he adds, in an unintentional assessment of the film itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Unrated. At Landmark’s E Street Cinema. Contains violence, some strong language, sexual situations and painted nudes. In French and some English with subtitles. 146 minutes.