Michael Pearce’s moody psychodrama Beast (2018), riffing on
themes of identity, guilt, love and innocence, opens with its besieged,
red-haired (27-year-old) protagonist Moll Huntford (Jessie Buckley) singing in a church
choir. The choir master, who also happens to be Moll’s mother (Gerladine James), stops the singing and asks Moll to raise her voice and keep up with the
vocal harmony. Later, in the day, Moll receives guests at her suburban family
home, situated in a picturesque yet oppressive coastal small-town. The occasion
is Moll’s birthday. She brushes off unwanted advances of a local police officer
named Clifford (Trystan Gravelle) with fake smiles and uneasy pauses, while
Moll’s sister announces her pregnancy to the gathering, hijacking the
celebrations and wishes for herself. Instantly we sympathize for Moll, who is the odd-one-out at choir, an outsider at her own party and treated as one by her family.
Moll works as a tour guide on tourist buses, a job of course the
sheltered girl dislikes. To vent her existential anxiety evoked by the
birthday-party, Moll runs away to a nightclub, dancing all-night with a stud.
In the morning, he walks Moll to a remote section of the beach and makes a move
on her, a little forcefully that may undoubtedly lead to rape. He is
interrupted by a gangly young man with a hunting rifle. He is an oddball named
Pascal Renouf (Johnny Flynn) and emits an earthy sensuality which Moll feels
attractive. Pascal says he is a native and calls himself a craftsman.
Naturally, the stern mother who likes to keep Moll’s passion and desire on a
leash disapproves her daughter’s choice for a boyfriend with subtly
condescending gestures. At one romantic occasion, Pascal takes Moll to the top
of cliff pointing towards the intimidating sea. The magnificent view, the warm
sun, red wispy hair of Moll waving in the gentle breeze, and intense looks of
Pascal makes the passionate kiss inevitable, sealing their bond. Going from
such a description, Beast might seem to be a very simple story of lonely,
ostracized souls finding each other. But this internal journey of Moll is not
only populated with sun-glided visuals, but also plagued by predatory and feral
instincts.
The small-town inhabitants are unsettled by
the serial-killing spree, targeting the island’s teenage girls. Three girls are
abducted and found brutally murdered, and a fourth one is already missing. It
is when these tensions and paranoia is flaring up, Moll meets Pascal. She could
very well be the young girl wearing a red riding cloak and Pascal the Big Bad
Wolf. However, Moll is already written off as a ‘bad girl’ by the town
residents (she is home-schooled due to a violent mistake made during her teenage
years). So, she’s not sweet and shy virgin methodically stalked by a monster. She
often finds empowerment by exhibiting the passions forbidden by her politely
cruel mother. This is shown when Moll vigorously kisses Pascal on an empty
field during nighttime. She pushes him to the ground and gets on top of him. In
the next scene, Moll sits at her living room sofa, her skin streaked
with soil. In these moments, the animalism lurking beneath Moll’s frail stance
comes to the fore. Subsequently, when Moll learns Pascal is not all
he claims to be and faces town bullies’ unchecked rage, the torrid, dark energy
within the young woman plays a pivotal role. Caught in-between the struggle to
find moral footing and resist animalistic attraction, Moll’s descent into
darkness is emotionally and visually rewarding.
Beast is an accomplished debut feature from Michael Pearce
that is neither a tale of romance nor a serial-killer thriller. It’s a tragic
and tense character study, set in a beguiling landscape that is at once eerie
and ethereal. The ‘bad-girl-meets-bad-boy’ trope has offered a very familiar
sub-genre of crime flicks (Kalifornia, Natural Born Killers to state few
examples). But Pearce in his treatment of bucolic surroundings with respect to
the protagonist’s existential agony brings to mind Terrence Malick’s debut
feature Badlands (1973). Both the central characters are wonderfully
ambivalent, with Buckley’s Moll easily dominating the film. Buckley perfectly
crafts a portrait of a repressed girl, craving for a cathartic discharge. The
subtlety with which she reveals joy, vulnerability, and rage delivers a
decisive emotional impact even when the narrative takes familiar paths. Flynn
brings an aura of intrigue and mystery to Pascal, keeping us on edge about
whether we should be worried about him or not.
Working with cinematographer Benajamin Kracun, director
Pearce conjures a sense of oppression and isolation from the sweeping
coastlines’ scenic beauty. This purposefully non-tourist gaze makes Moll’s
literal isolation resound in her surroundings. When Moll rebuffs her family’s
snobbish behavior towards Pascal, we see a shot of huge waves clobbering the lovers.
This tactic of using landscape as a conduit for Moll’s feelings or to set the
lovers against the world pays good dramatic dividends (Pearce also does well
with the wild nightmarish sequences). Overall,
Beast (106 minutes) makes up for what it lacks in originality through assured
direction, layered writing, and Jessie Buckley’s mesmerizing performance. It’s
a slow-burn fable, observing the limits of love and the darkest corners of evil.
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1 comment:
interesting movie review thanks fo sharing
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