Movie Review—Beast

Beast

by Peter J. O'Connell

Beast. Released: May 2018. Runtime: 107 mins. MPAA Rating: R for rough passion and beastly violence.

The poster for writer/director Michael Pearce's debut film, Beast, has the title in Fraktur, the Germanic style of lettering that might, for example, appear on the cover of an edition of the folk/fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. And the title of the film almost invites us to add “Beauty and the”--except on Pearce's Jersey, the British island where the film is set, beastliness may turn out to be more prevalent than beauty. 

Moll Huntford (Jessie Buckley), with her red hair and strong, yet sensitive, features might be thought of as a beauty, though of a distinctly non-glamourous type. Yet neither she nor her family, with whom she lives, actually consider the 27-year-old tour guide and choir singer to be beautiful, quite the contrary. She is dowdily dressed and comes across as awkward. Also, she has unusual views. For example, she says that she has been interested in killer whales all he life because they are “always smiling.”

Moll's frosty mother, Hilary (Geraldine James), and her snooty sister, Polly (Shannon Tarbet), treat Moll as a kind of combination of servant to be bossed around and sinner to be tightly controlled. (The nature of the sin is not made known to the audience for quite a while, which contributes to a sense of unease.) Moll's mother and her sister seem reminiscent of the nasty stepmother and stepsisters in the story of Cinderella. But will Moll meet up with a prince?

A good question! But she does encounter Pascal (Johnny Flynn). After being humiliated ny her family members at her own birthday party, Moll flees to a disco, parties all night, and finds herself on the beach the next morning with a guy who tries to rape her. Pascal, a sexy but scruffy poacher with a gun and a bag of dead rabbits, rescues her, and Moll becomes enamored of him—quite enamored. 

Is he the “Beast” to her “Beauty”? Or is he really a “prince” as in the stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty? Or is he the brooding dreamboat Heathcliff to her Cathy in the classic Gothic romance Wuthering Heights? Or is he like Mellors, the huntsman/gardener, to a love-starved Lady Chatterley in D.H. Lawrence's novel? Or is he the male half of a true-life crime couple such as Bonnie and Clyde in the 1930s or serial killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Fugate, in the 1950s--couples depicted in notable films, Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Badlands in 1973. (And, after all, “moll” is a term often used for a gangster's girlfriend.) Or is Beast a movie like Hitchcock's Suspicion in which we don't know whether or not the male lover is dangerous to his female partner? Or does Pascal's poached game suggest that Moll, like Lewis Carroll's Alice, is about to descend down a rabbit hole into a strange new world?

Pearce's point is not simply to multiply allusions for their own sake but to suggest the swirl of possibilities unleashed by the encounter of Moll and Pascal. As their relationship becomes more intense—and it becomes very intense indeed—Moll begins to rebel against the strictures imposed by her family and the tight little society of Jersey. And Pascal certainly relishes his “bad boy” role.

But the story of the love affair of Moll and Pascal and their revolt against the local establishment starts to become entangled with a whodunit. Four young women on the island have been raped and murdered. Investigators and the media begin to harass Moll and Pascal, for the bad boy Pascal is increasingly seen as the prime suspect in the killings. Moll defends her lover, but—and this is where the already gripping Beast becomes riveting—is she doing it because she really believes him to be innocent, or because she feels an affinity with one who kills?

Let's just say that this particular folk/fairy tale does not end “happy ever after.” However, those who manage to find a theatre showing it will have a notable cinematic experience. Pearce is clearly a director of promise. The cinematography of his film brings out both the beauty and the shadowy wildness of the setting, and the cast is impressive. Geraldine James as Hilary is chilling enough to air-condition a theatre just by her performance, and both Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn are charismatic. Buckley, whose face can be as stolid as the rock formations of Jersey or as changeable as the seas around the island, is a noteworthy addition to the long list of talented young British actresses who have graced filmdom over the past 25 years. She clearly knows Moll very well. As she said in an interview: “We all have dark shadows in our self that come out now and then.”