A troubled woman living in an isolated community finds herself pulled between the control of her oppressive family and the allure of a secretive outsider suspected of a series of brutal murders.
Writer/director Michael Pearce’s feature-length debut, the pseudo-gothic melodramatic thriller “Beast,” tries to be many things, but truly succeeds at only a few of them. It nails the tone of ambiguity, where you’re never quite sure who the titular “beast” is: its troubled heroine, Moll (a restrained but effective performance from Jessie Buckley), or the country heartthrob she falls for, Pascal Renouf (a somewhat sulky Johnny Flynn). The film is suitably atmospheric, Benjamin Kracun’s painterly cinematography imbuing everything with aquarelle surrealism. Geraldine James brings much-needed heat – in a film that features plenty of sex, mind you! – as Moll’s mother Hilary, by turns aggressive and caring, prejudiced and compassionate.
The film flounders when it comes to its tangled but derivative plot, one of young girls being kidnapped and murdered in a small community in Jersey – not New Jersey, but the little British island near the coast of Normandy. As soon as Hilary brings up her daughter’s “dark past,” a premonition so obvious it may as well be a flashback, involvement in the narrative starts to wane. Pascal, all sultry looks and bad boy attitude, shows up and makes sensual love to Moll in the tick-infested forest, despite her parents’ “white-privilege” disapproval. The local cop closes in on them as the primary suspects of the local killings. The film, at its heart, ends up being just another old-school romance between rebellious teens, albeit cloaked in an arthouse robe. The not-so-twist ending is anticlimactic.
There’s nothing technically “wrong” with “Beast.” It has its own (somewhat tedious) pace and a central performance steeped in sensuous vagueness. There are scenes – like the one where Moll hugs a certain mom and then runs off roaring like a, well, beast – that stand out as effective, verging on powerful. It’s just that Pearce seems afraid to truly cross the line, to show us what that torment of first love, of a tumultuous past, of an oppressive family, of forbidden desires and nightmarish urges feels like. He keeps it safe, despite the violent outbursts and allusions to a dark gothic fairy-tale. Sometimes stepping off the beaten path is not such a bad thing. It’s where all kinds of magnificent beasts lurk.
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