The Beast

15A146 min

Synopsis

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay star in the new film from Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance, Nocturama, Coma), an audacious, ambitious and dreamy sci-fi of epic scope, loosely inspired by Henry James’s novella, The Beast of the Jungle, and playing off contemporary concerns about a world ruled by technology gone rogue.In the near future, emotions have become a threat. Gabrielle (Seydoux) decides to purify her DNA in a machine that will plunge her into her past lives and rid her of all strong feelings. She then meets Louis (MacKay) and feels a powerful connection to him – as if she had always known him. Circling each other through time, their story spans three distinct periods: 1910, 2014 and 2044.Building on the core ideas and concerns of his previous films, Bonello’s arresting, intriguing, ravishingly romantic film crosses time and space to depict a dystopia in which people are so afraid of rejection that they eliminate the very possibility of love (their avoidance of difficult emotions recalling Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).