The launching pad for Bertrand Bonello\u2019s new picture \u201cThe Beast\u201d (\u201cLa Bete\u201d) is a 1903 short story by Henry James called \u201cThe Beast in the Jungle.\u201d Seen by some James scholars as an autobiographical expression of rue for a life of inaction, it treats the case of John Marcher, who confides in his acquaintance May Bartram that he lives in fear of an unnamable catastrophe that could upend his life, and the life of anyone close to him. She claims to get what he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018You mean you feel how my obsession \u2014 poor old thing \u2014 may correspond to some possible reality?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018To some possible reality.\u2019 <\/p>\n
\u2018Then you will <\/em>watch with me?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n And so May does. And Marcher\u2019s fear translates into a passivity that compels him to hold May at arm\u2019s length for the rest of his life. At the end of the story, he mourns a love he never allowed himself to have and understands that the catastrophe was his own fear. <\/p>\n In Bonello\u2019s film, the fear belongs to the popular Parisian concert pianist Gabrielle Monnier (Lea Seydoux), who, around the time of the great 1910 flood of France\u2019s City of Lights, confesses this fear to Louis (George MacKay), a young Englishman with whom she soon begins a tentative liaison. But the trouble they encounter has nothing to do with Gabrielle\u2019s reticence to enter into a romantic relationship with Louis\u2014although that does exist. <\/p>\n Bonello\u2019s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He\u2019s here to tell us to be afraid\u2014be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far. A vision of three (actually four) nightmare times, all of them in the same vexed world. <\/p>\n The cataclysms that fall upon Gabrielle\u2014played by a superbly controlled and often heartbreaking Lea Seydoux\u2014aren\u2019t spiritual or conceptual (well, of course, at first, they are), they\u2019re \u201creal,\u201d or Real. They\u2019re corporeal\/physical, or simulations of the corporeal physical. And they\u2019re unavoidable. Boy oh boy can you not stop what\u2019s coming. Close that browser window, rewind that video, press mute on the sound system, reset the house alarm, none of it will do you any good. Not even an alteration in the fabric of reality itself\u2014and this seems to occur at least a half dozen times in the picture\u2014will stave off horror. The beast isn\u2019t in the jungle, it\u2019s in the house, and it\u2019s in the air we can only barely breathe when the movie gets to 2044. It is in us; it is us. <\/p>\n Sounds cheerful, right? Well, what can I tell you? Bonello has a way of throwing us into an enhanced vision of the degrading noise of contemporary life that\u2019s all the more engaging for being so even-handed and deliberate. I mentioned three timelines that are actually four\u2014the movie is framed, kind of, by a green-screen session in which Seydoux, possibly playing Gabrielle, possibly playing herself, is coached through paces for a scene in which she actually apprehends \u201cthe beast\u201d and lets out a blood-curdling scream. The image degenerates into a gorgeous abstract mural of pixels. Digitization is here both a source of ravishing sights and sounds and an Excedrin headache of aural and visual glitch. The movie then bounces through three time periods: 1910, 2044\u2014where Gabrielle\u2019s character seeks to abolish her reincarnation torment through a \u201cDNA purge\u201d\u2014and most terrifyingly, 2014, wherein \u201cGabby\u201d is housesitting in L.A. and targeted by the angry incel version of MacKay\u2019s Louis\u2014Louis Lewansky, who\u2019s 30 and never been with a woman despite his \u201cmagnificence,\u201d and who\u2019s now getting ready to avenge himself. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The launching pad for Bertrand Bonello\u2019s new picture \u201cThe Beast\u201d (\u201cLa Bete\u201d) is a 1903 short story by Henry James called \u201cThe Beast in the Jungle.\u201d Seen by some James scholars as an autobiographical expression of rue for a life of inaction, it treats the case of John Marcher, who confides in his acquaintance May …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[45,39,51],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction-movies","tag-drama","tag-romance","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}