'Beast' A Review

Beast is a psychological drama about a young woman Moll(Jessie Buckley) on the island of Jersey discontent under her controlling mother and oblivious brother and sister who meets a mysterious loner Pascal(Johnny Flynn). The film opens on Moll's birthday where her mother, sister, and brother are being awful to her so she leaves. She dances all night and leaves with a guy who turns out to be a jerk, before things get really awful Pascal scares him off and the two begin a timid courtship. Concurrently in the community there are a series of violent murders, the policy throw suspicion on Pascal and Moll suffers from guilt of her own.

Flynn and Buckley both put in good performance, better than the movie in which they're in. The supporting cast are all fine but everyone including the leads has to contend with a preposterous script that frequently strains plausibility. Moll's family is so over-the-top oppressive it verges into soap opera. The shameful event from her past that is referred to multiple times is so tame as to be almost, if not normal than at least totally understandable. The way the cops act is dubious to the point of laughability and calls into question what rights UK citizens have. This is all to say the script has a profound lack of clarity and intention. Flynn and Buckley have great chemistry and if the story were simply a tale of their love it would actually be watchable, even interesting.

The narrative vagueness extends into the setting. The production design is nebulous late 20th century, the costumes are pre-Mod 60's, at one point a cop takes out a clearly contemporary recording device. It's unclear what year it is and also unclear what town the characters are in until Jersey is referred to at the end of the 2nd Act. There are some interesting dream/nightmare/hallucination sequences and beautiful romantic shots of cliffs and beach and fields. Visually there's a point of view, too bad the content of the shots is so muddled.

A lot of the elements of the film are passable to even decent, clearly a lot of effort was put in. However there is such a startling lack of clarity in the script that the film is virtually unwatchable. The way numerous characters act is so outrageous it is humorous. The "twists" of the plot range from unclear to dumb. The "inner psychology" of the lead is so unclear it comes across as totally contrived. The shifting of suspicion, which becomes the focal point of the story, is not only forced its mostly irrelevant. The ending has nothing going for it save that it is an ending and signals the film is complete.

Don't See It.