Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a film about the danger of suppressing emotion. It suppresses its own most dangerous emotion by putting it in 2044.
Henry James wrote “The Beast in the Jungle” in 1903 and it has never stopped being the most uncomfortable short story in the English language. Its subject is a man named John Marcher who believes that some extraordinary catastrophe is waiting for him in the future, crouching in the dark, ready to spring. He lives his entire life in anticipation of this event, holding himself carefully apart from experience — from love, from risk, from the ordinary vulnerability of being a person among other people — so that he will be ready when it comes. It comes. The catastrophe is that nothing came. The beast in the jungle was his own emotional vacancy. The terrible event he spent his life bracing for was the life he failed to live while bracing.
It is one of the great inside-out tragedies in Western literature. Marcher does not need a machine to suppress his feelings. He does not need a dystopian society or an AI control grid or a purification procedure. He manages it entirely alone, from the inside, through the simple mechanism of waiting. The horror is that no external force is required. The beast was always already interior.
Bertrand Bonello read this story and made a film he called The Beast. It is a genuinely extraordinary film — ambitious, visually ravishing, haunted, anchored by a performance from Léa Seydoux that sustains three separate incarnations across two and a half hours without losing a strand of continuity. It premiered at Venice in 2023, was rejected by Cannes, and is the most formally daring thing Bonello has made. It is also, in the most precise and illuminating way, a film that has misread the thing it loves most.
| Director | Bertrand Bonello |
|---|---|
| Year | 2023 |
| Runtime | 146 minutes |
| Cast | Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova |
| Award | Venice Film Festival Competition, 2023 |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel, MUBI |
The film follows Gabrielle across three time periods — Belle Époque Paris, Los Angeles in 2014, and a near-future 2044 in which AI controls everything and human emotions have been designated a liability. In the future strand, Gabrielle undergoes a DNA purification procedure designed to remove the emotional residue of her past lives, particularly her recurring entanglement with Louis, who appears in each era as a different face, a different man, the same gravitational pull. The film argues that to be alive is to be vulnerable to love, and that any system designed to eliminate that vulnerability is a system designed to eliminate what makes us human.
This is a real argument and Bonello makes it with genuine conviction. But watch what he has done to James in making it.
In “The Beast in the Jungle,” the suppression of feeling is an interior act. Marcher does it to himself. In The Beast, the suppression of feeling is an exterior condition. Society does it to Gabrielle. The 2044 world is the machine that wants to erase her emotions, and she is the feeling human resisting it. Bonello has taken James’s most terrifying insight — that we are perfectly capable of destroying our own emotional lives without any assistance — and given it a villain. He has externalised the beast.
This is not nothing. It is a coherent adaptation choice and it produces a film of real power. But something is lost in the translation that the film cannot see. By requiring the dystopian scaffolding to make its case, The Beast reveals that it does not quite trust the interior version of the argument. The enemy needs to be named. The threat needs a face. And giving it a face — AI, 2044, the purification clinic — accidentally gives Gabrielle something James explicitly refused to give Marcher: an excuse. Marcher had no external force to blame. His vacancy was entirely self-generated. Gabrielle’s is imposed on her. She is not suppressing her own emotions. She is having them suppressed.
“James’s beast was always already inside. By putting it in 2044 and giving it a control grid and a purification machine, Bonello made it possible to fight back. What he could not see was that fighting back was never the point.”
The film’s most unguarded moment lives in the 2014 strand, where Louis appears not as a romantic foil but as something genuinely frightening: a self-described incel in a Los Angeles apartment, posting video manifestos to an empty internet, obsessively tracking Gabrielle’s social media presence and escalating toward violence. Bonello modelled this Louis on Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings. It is the film’s most viscerally contemporary sequence and its most honest one, because here the beast is not in 2044 and it is not a machine. It is a man who has allowed his fear and longing to calcify into something monstrous, entirely from the inside. This Louis is closer to James’s Marcher than any other version in the film — a person whose catastrophe is entirely self-authored, whose violence is the externalisation of an interior void rather than a response to exterior control. The 2014 segment is the film briefly trusting James, and it is the most disturbing thing in it.
The rest of the film keeps the beast at arm’s length. In the Belle Époque strand, the threat is a flood, literal and external. In 2044, it is the state and its machines. Only in Los Angeles does the beast appear without scaffolding, crouching exactly where James left it — inside a person who could not bear what he felt and turned it outward.
There is something else the film is haunted by that it cannot quite name.
The Beast was conceived and written for Gaspard Ulliel, Bonello’s collaborator on Saint Laurent, with Léa Seydoux always intended alongside him. Ulliel died in January 2022, in a skiing accident, before filming began. George MacKay was cast in his place. Bonello said he wanted a non-French actor specifically to avoid any audience association with Ulliel — to make the replacement legible rather than ghostly. And yet. The film is about a love that keeps losing its face. Louis appears in three incarnations across three eras, always recognisable as the same force, never quite the same person. Gabrielle keeps finding him and losing him and finding him altered. The film’s deepest subject — the persistence of love across the loss of its original form — is also, quietly and unreckoned-with, its own production history. Bonello wrote a love story for a specific man. That man died. The film was made with someone else. The beast that crouched in the film’s own jungle was the absence it could not put in the script.
This connects to something that has surfaced more than once in this blog’s growing conversation with itself. The absent figure who haunts from outside the frame — Anna in Saraband, the past that Hirayama has built his whole beautiful routine to keep at bay in Perfect Days — appears again here, except this time the absence is the film’s own. It is not a character who is missing. It is the actor who was supposed to embody the love the film is about. Bonello handled it with grace and professionalism. What he could not do, and could not have done, was make a film that knew what that absence had done to it.
The comparison that earns its place is not Mulholland Drive, though Bonello’s debt to Lynch is real and worn openly. It is the James novella itself, because the divergence from it is the argument. But if a second film is needed, it is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), which shares the premise of technological emotion-erasure almost exactly and makes the opposite formal choice: it goes entirely inside. Gondry and Charlie Kaufman give us no exterior dystopia, no control grid, no societal villain. The machine is small and domestic and the horror is intimate. Eternal Sunshine trusts that the interior is sufficient. The Beast does not. The difference between the two films is the difference between where each director believed the beast actually lived.
The Beast is the work of a filmmaker at the peak of his formal powers making a film that does not quite trust its own best instinct. The instinct is Jamesian: that the most catastrophic thing a person can do is hold themselves apart from risk, from love, from the full exposure of being alive. The film knows this. It just couldn’t resist giving the catastrophe a machine to run it.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004): the film that shares The Beast‘s central premise and makes the opposite structural choice — going entirely inside rather than into a dystopian exterior, and trusting that the interior is terrifying enough on its own.
Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003): for the absent figure who haunts from outside the frame — in Bergman’s case a dead wife represented by a photograph, here a dead actor represented by a different face — and for what it looks like when a film is honest about being made in the shadow of someone who is no longer there.
UnspokenCinema publishes every week. No ratings. No rankings. Just what films reveal without meaning to.