THE BEAST
Using Henry James’s
haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative
inspiration, award-winning French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello crafts an ambitious time-hopping sci-fi epic about
a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who
undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her
past lives—removed. In so doing, she realizes her fate has long been
intertwined with a young man (George
MacKay). Touching on modern anxieties of AI, The Beast, asks vital
questions about the ever-shifting status of humanity itself. (France, Canada, 2024, 146 mins, French,
English | Dir. Bertrand Bonello)