Director: Bertrand Bonello
Stars: Léa Seydoux, George McKay, Guslagie Malanda
In 2011 essay book Collage Culture – Examining the 21st Century Identity Crisis, Mandy Khan expresses concern over how our modern experience of the recent past has become a free-for-all, pilfering from multiple decades at the same time, and questions whether this disarray might cause us some latent side-effects. A kind of temporal nausea, perhaps. That while the decades of the 20th century reacted against one another, the early decades of the 21st century seemed destined to simply remix ad nauseum, and perhaps stagnate and homogenise as a result. It’s a musing that came to mind while taking in Bertrand Bonello’s monolithic latest, loosely inspired by Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle. It’s a stubborn and often obtuse odyssey through the decades of the last century as it wrestles with one of the scariest ideas out there; love.
In 2044, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is a dissatisfied worker (one of the remaining few) who elects to undergo a new procedure to purge the latent emotions of her past lives. Half-submerged in a shallow pool of black liquid, she is injected with a substance that engenders the movie’s staccato flashbacks. Through these Gabrielle re-discovers memories of a burgeoning affair she had in the 1910s with Louis (George McKay). Troubled by an unshakeable sense that catastrophe lies in wait (the ‘beast’ of the title), the Gabrielle of the 1910s speaks to a medium who offers cryptic suggestions. Tragedy does strike, and a fire in a doll factory leads to life-or-death decisions between Gabrielle and Louis over how to escape.
Then, in 2014, the two are fated to meet again. In this expansive section of the film Gabrielle is an aspiring French actor staying in an expensive house on the Hollywood hills as she tries to get a footing in the industry, while Louis is a tragically disaffected and angry incel vlogger documenting his own escalating rage. Louis starts to stalk Gabrielle as his frustrations grow homicidal. Lastly, in the 2044 narrative, Gabrielle once again runs into Louis, undergoing the same strenuous procedure, and her experience of him is coloured by these recently invoked memories.
It’s a big-brained and ambitious sci-fi conceit, presented in a manner that I’d hasten to call thrillingly original if it didn’t owe such a profound debt. With a site name like The Lost Highway Hotel I’m loathe to invoke David Lynch too often as a touchstone except a) his influence is becoming increasingly evident as a new generation of filmmakers come through, and b) Bonello’s The Beast is so Lynchian, but in a way that understands the methods of the famed surrealist as opposed to some kind of lazy pastiche.
The Beast shares certain motifs with Twin Peaks: The Return (a woman’s guttural scream that seems to rip through time, talking dolls, party girl trios, a certain volatility to the laws of the world around us), but Bonello seems to have been a quick study in the sonic palette and editing impulses of Lynch’s mammoth 18-hour masterpiece. In the 2014 sections particularly there is an uncanny reminiscence in the clarity, pacing and even visual staging of his escalating home invasion thriller (Josée Deshaies bravura cinematography even looks like Peter Deming’s). The sensibility is further echoed in decisions made regarding how to tell this story, and Bonello’s inclination to lean on symbolism, a-chronology, free association and an unerringly rendered sense of déjà vu. In 2014 Gabrielle also contacts a medium, while a through-line with pigeons turns the vague pests into wrought omens of doom.
Throughout Bonello seems fascinated by the fallibility of memory. Even during their initial encounters, Gabrielle and Louis’ discourse playfully picks apart the possibility of a previous meeting some years before, Louis seemingly misremembering key details while Gabrielle remains his fixed point. Later, when we’re wrapped up in the De Palma-esque thrills of a cat-and-mouse game in a Hollywood Airbnb, Bonello starts tampering with the footage, as though someone has stolen the remote from us. Scenes awkwardly pause, rewind and replay (conjuring to mind Michael Haneke’s Funny Games to no small degree). Like a record skipping or a DVD degrading, Gabrielle’s re-runs have an imperfect quality that asks us to question their authenticity. Bonello cheekily pushes it all further by cutting in and out of one of her gigs performing on a green-screen stage. As the fear of mortality floods her with adrenaline, it is as if she is disassociating in the moment. A visual rendering of the panicked thought, “This can’t be happening”.
Seydoux gives one of her most committed, versatile and interesting performances of a career already filled with such gifts. Though entirely different, this is up there with her recent best in Mia Hansen-Løve’s achingly humanistic One Fine Morning. There’s little doubt at this stage that she’s one of the great performers of her generation. This is her Mulholland Drive or INLAND EMPIRE if you’ll forgive me a further pair of inevitable (and warranted!) comparisons.
The conflation of a love lasting through time with the behaviours of incel-Louis makes The Beast feel thorny, even edgelordish. A 21st century Travis Bickle character, McKay makes this Louis a laughable – but not pitiable – wretch. Bonello leans into it, coming to the brink of caricature as he ridicules this type of modern man, mocking his entitlement but also questioning it. Still, the love encountered in the past retains such a subconscious hold over Gabrielle that she pauses in his presence, even – potentially – indulging in a fantasy of their (re)union.
It initially feels uneasy, then, that her latter self is so driven to reconnect with this soul who has tormented her for decades. Is his hate as powerful as his love? Are they derived from the same place? Both emotions have the capacity to so thoroughly change us, overcome us, control us. Is it any wonder they can be as terrifying as each other? This is where Bonello’s piece broods. The Beast evokes questions that don’t feel easy, and that seems deliberate.
As a result – and thanks to the uncompromising sequencing of its assemblage – it’s liable to be a picture that alienates as many (if not more) viewers than it beguiles. This one’s for a particular brand of cinephile sicko. For better or worse, you can count me in.
The Lost Highway Hotel 