Beast | Little White Lies

Beast

23 Apr 2018 / Released: 27 Apr 2018

Two figures standing by the ocean; a woman in a yellow dress and a man in a beige jacket.
Two figures standing by the ocean; a woman in a yellow dress and a man in a beige jacket.
3

Anticipation.

Not much to go on, but the premise looks intriguing.

4

Enjoyment.

Grisly and gorgeous in almost equal measure.

4

In Retrospect.

A scenic spine-chiller bolstered by a magnificent leads.

Leads Jessie Buck­ley and John­ny Fly­nn are mag­nif­i­cent in this moody Jer­sey-set dra­ma from Michael Pearce.

Not quite Eng­land and not quite France, the isle of Jer­sey occu­pies a unique space with­in Europe. While the pic­turesque idyll is pri­mar­i­ly known for its tem­per­ate cli­mate and his­to­ry of cat­tle farm­ing, in Michael Pearce’s Beast, it takes on the sin­is­ter iden­ti­ty of a suf­fo­cat­ing enclave in a strange state of social flux. As much a char­ac­ter as the peo­ple inhab­it its sweep­ing coast­lines and dark crevices, it pro­vides an ethe­re­al, eerie set­ting for first love and last rites.

Jer­sey makes for a beguil­ing set­ting at once famil­iar and strange, the con­trast between dreamy sum­mer hol­i­day spot and sparse wilder­ness high­light­ed through smart cin­e­matog­ra­phy (c/​o Ben­jamin Kra­cun). A sense of lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal iso­la­tion – the sug­ges­tion that life on the island trick­les rather than flows – ren­ders Beast a dra­ma that mean­ders slow­ly but pur­pose­ful­ly towards its ago­nis­ing conclusion.

Turn­ing to more human char­ac­ters, Beast presents audi­ences with Moll (Jessie Buck­ley), a trou­bled young woman strug­gling under the iron grip of her con­trol­ling moth­er. Slight and fear­ful with wide brown eyes, she goes about the sum­mer with a restrained long­ing, work­ing as a coach tour guide by day, and bat­tling famil­ial ten­sions with her par­ents and sib­lings at night. The cat­a­lyst for change in her stag­nant life is the appear­ance of Pas­cal (John­ny Fly­nn), a rough, mys­te­ri­ous lon­er who Moll finds her­self drawn to despite the dis­tain of her fam­i­ly and the wider community.

While pup­py love unfolds between Moll and Pas­cal, a mur­der­er is on the loose, prey­ing on the island’s teenage girls. As ten­sions begin to flare and accu­sa­tions stack up, Moll is forced to con­front the very real pos­si­bil­i­ty that her new beau is not all he claims to be – and more wor­ry­ing­ly, the uneasy thought that she might not care. On the sur­face, Pearce’s film sounds like a fair­ly con­ven­tion­al bad-boy-meets-good-girl-chaos-ensues romp, along the lines of Bad­lands or Nat­ur­al Born Killers, but there is so much more buried beneath the top­soil, wait­ing to be unearthed.

The rela­tion­ship between Moll and Pas­cal, whilst cen­tral, is by no means the film’s heart. This instead belongs to the per­for­mance giv­en by the aston­ish­ing­ly good Buck­ley, who piv­ots from morose vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to snarling rage in a moment’s notice. Her wide-eyed can­dour is cap­ti­vat­ing, but it’s the sub­tle­ty with which she reveals Moll’s spi­ralling descent into dark­ness that real­ly resonates.

Mean­while Fly­nn pro­vides an intrigu­ing foil as Pas­cal, an errat­ic, mys­te­ri­ous pres­ence whose pri­ma­ry method of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is a loaded stare or a know­ing a grin. Two out­siders in a close-knit com­mu­ni­ty, Moll and Pas­cal are quick to set them­selves up togeth­er against the world, but there’s always a creep­ing sense that their folie à deux can’t last forever.

Beast is an accom­plished debut fea­ture for Michael Pearce, who for the most part man­ages to bring fresh ideas and char­ac­ters to the estab­lished sub-genre of romance-tinged thrillers. The only real mis­step is an end­ing that feels alto­geth­er too tidy giv­en the film’s frayed edges, but there lurks a sense of breath-steal­ing unease even with­in its final frame.

Beast is released 27 April. Read our inter­view with star Jessie Buck­ley.

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