Beast

Before a show­ing of Beast, you might be treat­ed to a trail­er for an upcom­ing re-release of Jaws, draw­ing a rather unfor­tu­nate com­par­i­son. While Spielberg’s film was an obvi­ous point of inspi­ra­tion for this one, which swaps its great white shark for an equal­ly blood­thirsty lion, it does the rather insub­stan­tial Beast no favors to remind its audi­ence of its far supe­ri­or fore­fa­ther. Still, those seek­ing the sim­ple plea­sure of watch­ing Idris Elba fight a lion won’t walk away disappointed.

Elba is Nate Samuels, a doc­tor whose obses­sion with work made him a dis­tant father to his daugh­ters, Mered­ith (Iyana Hal­ley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jef­fries). When his wife dies, he tries to recon­nect with his girls and process their grief by vis­it­ing the South African vil­lage where she was born. Nate’s ranger friend Mar­tin (Sharl­to Cop­ley) takes the fam­i­ly on a tour of the near­by wildlife pre­serve, unaware that the area is being stalked by a lion who has tak­en to killing humans for sport.

Beast suc­ceeds where it counts, in tense sequences of the fam­i­ly evad­ing the lion’s attacks. These scenes are effec­tive in their brute sim­plic­i­ty. The film nev­er over­com­pli­cates itself with too-clever twists. There is an appre­cia­ble ruth­less­ness to Beast’s action, with the stakes nev­er evolv­ing beyond ​“if we leave this truck, the lion will eat us.” In a genre occa­sion­al­ly too-clever-by-half, Beast is exact­ly as straight­for­ward as it needs to be.

What made Jaws’ shark scary wasn’t mere­ly that it could kill peo­ple, but that for some unfath­omable rea­son it want­ed to kill peo­ple. Beast’s lion oper­ates on a sim­i­lar prin­ci­ple. The film opens with poach­ers trap­ping and killing most of its fam­i­ly, caus­ing it to lash out and slaugh­ter them. That the lion is on a roar­ing ram­page of revenge is an amus­ing touch, cre­at­ing a bizarre impli­ca­tion of eth­i­cal right­eous­ness on the animal’s part. The film is nev­er cloy­ing in this respect, how­ev­er. It is per­fect­ly hap­py to char­ac­ter­ize the lion as psy­chot­ic and amoral, killing for plea­sure and rev­el­ing in its prey’s ter­ror. Nature in Beast’s man-vs-wild strug­gle isn’t chill­ing­ly indif­fer­ent, it’s biased.

Beast’s major defi­cien­cy is in Kormákur’s direc­tion, which comes across as far too classy. There are sev­er­al floaty track­ing shots through­out, mak­ing parts of it feel like a bud­get ver­sion of Ale­jan­dro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. These shots call atten­tion to the director’s tech­ni­cal skill, giv­ing the film an aura of respectabil­i­ty when it should be indulging in the grim­i­ness of its premise. The same thing is felt in the film’s first twen­ty min­utes, which painstak­ing­ly estab­lish the dys­func­tion of Nate’s fam­i­ly and the tragedy of their loss. A back­sto­ry about grief and/​or trau­ma seems to be a pre­req­ui­site for hor­ror and thriller films these days, and Beast would not have suf­fered for doing away with it.

Beast doesn’t rein­vent the wheel when it comes to ani­mal sur­vival films, but it’s free enough of fat and frills to war­rant a watch in the the­atri­cal dog days of summer.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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