By John Corrado

French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a sweeping romantic drama starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers reconnecting and being torn apart across moments in time.

Bonello’s film is set in a future where AI controls the world, and strong feelings are discouraged. Seydoux’s Gabrielle is undergoing a process to have her emotions and memories expunged, immersed in a vat of black liquid.

Through this, Gabrielle gets to experience a series of past lives where she keeps encountering MacKay’s Louis, a young man who seems familiar every time they meet. The film unfolds around moments from their lives across different lifetimes and in multiple time periods, allowing Bonello to mix elements of costume drama, minimalist sci-fi, and ice cold thriller.

The result is a quasi-Lynchian odyssey of past lives and lost loves, that is swooningly romantic one moment, and genuinely unsettling the next. It’s a sort of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind melded with Mulholland Drive and Cloud Atlas (as well as a few cerebral influences from The Matrix). The two leads keep it grounded. Seydoux is captivating as the conflicted romantic lead, creating a heroine who remains consistent across the different timelines. The film also serves as a compelling showcase for MacKay, including an incredibly chilling portrayal of an incel loner in one of the timelines.

It’s an ambitious, swing for the fences type of film, and I’m not sure it all works (the film begins slowly and the pacing sometimes feels off, before it starts to pick up partway through). But there are moments of tension, grandeur, and power that linger and stick with you, and I ended the film feeling like I needed to watch it again to fully absorb everything I had seen.

Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)

The Beast opens exclusively in theatres in limited release on April 19th. It’s being distributed in Canada by Maison 4:3.