The Beast

From the outset writer-director Bertrand Bonello's The Beast seems to be building a very specific kind of scaffolding, one that uses a science fiction premise and the fantastical technology available therein, to detail a would-be affair that occurs again and again, across multiple centuries and lifetimes. In an emptied-out, Covid-compliant future, Léa Seydoux's Gabrielle argues with machines of varying sophistication about her career prospects. Gabrielle's reluctance to sink herself into oil and have her past lives audited for emotional irregularities means that she is only able to perform the most menial of tasks. The artificial intelligence that presides over the Paris of the 2040s simply refusing to collaborate with persons who haven't subjected themselves to strange, somnambulist experiments that resolve certain, unseemly emotional responses. Despite a very obviously shrunken human population, the machine masters of The Beast have little use for anyone who isn't attempting to match their serene, robotic neutrality. 

The horror here then is that not only has an impartial kind of intelligence mapped out human suffering to such an exacting degree, arriving as well at an inhuman sort of solution, but that mistakes made lifetimes ago can still impact upon the now, damaging a person who hasn't even had a chance to influence those experiences. The ability to dip in and out of these scenarios and participate in this latent trauma doesn't seem to be particularly therapeutic either. More of a blunt force correction that fails to make any concession for the wants or desires of the fixed, human identity trespassing outside of their own era. When Gabrielle does take the plunge, subjecting herself to lengthy, fragmented dreams in which she relives key instances of stress that have stained her karmic soul, the sticking points always revolve around George MacKay's Louis. He first appears as a chaste, Victorian suitor who refuses to act upon the signals being beamed directly at him by Gabrielle's married equivalent. This sumptuous interlude, premised around an expected sort of propriety wrongfoots the audience about the kind of person that Louis is. 

When we meet Louis again a hundred or so years later, this inability to act upon his desires has curdled into something violent and reproachful. The hesitance of a high-society (supreme) gentleman now fully realised as a ranting incel who creeps around at night, following women in his car while trying to build up enough courage to do something awful. Loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, Bonello's film disdains the dithering, male perspective on commitment to detail how terrible it is to be the subject in somebody else's problem. To be both incredibly vital and yet somehow still extraneous. In all of their meetings Gabrielle is quite capable of recognising the connection between herself and Louis. She pursues him, using the apparatus of her age to appear open and amenable. It is Louis who resists, unwilling or unable to be truly brave and take a chance. The Beast is a cumulative experience then, a forlorn piece that makes its point out of fragments that, very deliberately, fail to congeal into anything romantically satisfying. Léa Seydoux, as photographed by Josée Deshaies, is our only real constant. The actress very rarely anywhere but the centre of the frame. Often the camera will slowly close in on her face, eliminating all extraneous information to fill our screens with a pair of big blue eyes that permanently look like they are on the verge of weeping. 

Crimes of the Future

Writer-director David Cronenberg's latest, Crimes of the Future, begins with a child hunkering down beneath a bathroom sink to tuck into the pink plastic bin that usually occupies that space. As he feasts, a thick white drool dangles from his mouth. Later we learn that this frothy sputum is caustic, an evolutionary advantage that will allow a new sub-species of humankind to consume and digest the synthetic trash that is crammed into every corner of our world. In the moment though, Sozos Sotiris' Brecken registers as a perfectly concealed Brundlefly - the mutant off-shot able to summon up corrosive digestive enzymes at will. This feeling of summation is threaded throughout Crimes: the mind-warping agenda of extreme, sensationalist, art from Videodrome rubs up against the pearlescent bio-mechanoids of eXistenZ; Shivers' mix of sex and surgery runs concurrent to failing attempts, by boring bureaucrats, to catalogue violent metamorphosis. The latter straight out of Scanners. 

Set in and around an art world dedicated to euphoric body modification, Viggo Mortensen's Saul Tenser and Léa Seydoux's Caprice are a double-act of critically appreciated performance artists. Saul is the canvas, Caprice the brush. Although we are told that pain and infection have largely been eliminated in this oddly Mediterranean present, Saul writhes in agony throughout the film. Unlike his partner, who can hold steaming skillets and must voluntarily alter her appearance, Saul's body is constantly undergoing twisting transformation. His insides give birth to new, unknown organs that are assumed to be vestigial and potentially tumourous. Cocooned in a operating bed that looks like a cross between the sarcophagus of a deep-sea monarch and a caterpillar's chrysalis, Saul submits himself to Caprice's surgical tinkering for the amusement of the champagne and canapés set. Even Saul's attempts to feed himself primary-coloured mush requires a soothing, swishing, skeletal apparatus - one designed to simulate the movements that a body locked in choking dysphagia has otherwise grown unaccustomed to. 

Beneath this new flesh garnish though, Crimes revolves around the sickly tension present in interpersonal incidents with clear hierarchical tiers - pitching and networking as an uncommon horror that demands artists pluck out their trembling insides then place them under someone else's microscope. In this sense Crimes treads similar ground to Cronenberg's earlier film Maps to the Stars. Whereas in that film the status that comes with fame allowed for a childish and chronic misbehaviour, Crimes examines these interactions from a perspective coloured by advancing age. Saul is elderly and established, unconsciously cooking up new projects in a mad rush to produce before his collapsing body begins its path to conclusion. In Crimes then the revulsion is generated not just by largely bloodless scenes of autopsy but by an overly appreciative audience, desperate to win any kind of favour with Saul. A scene with Kristen Stewart's Timlin, a junior staff member with the National Organ Registry, sees the young woman attempting to seduce Saul but, in practice, her overly enthusiastic regard is shown to be suffocating. Saul cannot help physically retreating from her fawning broadcasts, covering his mouth and face with his hands before, finally, conclusively ruining the mood by declaring that he is sexually inadequate.