Film reviews: Beast | Official Competition | Her Way

Cast as a tourist forced to protect his two daughters from a vengeful lion, Idris Elba makes a credibly reluctant action hero in Beast, writes Alistair Harkness

Idris Elba in Beast

Beast (15) ***

Official Competition (15) ***

Her Way (18) ***

Having voiced Shere Khan in The Jungle Book and humiliated himself in Cats, Idris Elba continues his feline film journey with Beast, an entertainingly gnarly lion-vs-humans B-movie about a widowed doctor (Elba) battling to protect his teenage daughters when a safari trip to his late wife’s South African homeland goes very wrong. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (Everest) follows the old Jaws template by pretending Beast is really a family drama rather than a straight-up animal attacks movie, thus we send much of the first act establishing the frosty relationship between Elba’s character, Dr Nate Samuels, and his eldest daughter “Mer” (Iyana Halley), who, unlike her phone-obsessed younger sister Norah (Leah Jeffries), blames him for not being around when their mother was dying. These scenes are nicely played and though the film needlessly includes a recurring dream sequence to signify the extent to which Nate’s failings as a husband plague his subconscious, Elba is good at playing someone forced to absorb the emotional hits from his children as he tries to hold his family together.

He’s good too at credibly edging into the film’s action heroics. Cast as a wildlife ranger and Nate’s friend and host, Sharlto Copley may bluntly spell out the film’s theme by announcing that “a male lion protects its pride”, but when a vengeful lion starts stalking Nate and his family after poachers kill its family, Elba still plays the character as someone out of his element, his medical training equipping him to treat wounds, not instantly figure out how best to deal with the four-legged hunter prowling nearby. The first wave of sustained big cat action is the best, with Kormakur close-quartering the repeated attacks by stranding his protagonists in a broken-down jeep with no radio reception and limiting the film’s perspective to what they can see from within the truck and, eventually, from under it. As the plot progresses, tension isn’t always sustained as effectively, but it’s slickly enough made and even though we’re not in Roar territory (the notoriously dangerous 1981 Tippi Hedren film made with real lions), Elba’s CGI co-star makes a formidable adversary.

A satire on the movie business that’s almost as indulgent as the world it’s mocking, Spanish comedy Official Competition stars Penelopé Cruz as a globally famous arthouse auteur hired by an ageing businessman (José Luis Gómez) to make a prestige movie in a vain effort to secure his legacy. That the names of film financiers aren’t exactly chiselled into the consciousness of the film-going public is presumably supposed to be part of the joke, but really it’s a convenient way to kickstart a battle of egos as rehearsals for the project get under way.

The film eschews the usual on-set backdrop of movies about movies, becoming instead more of a backstage chamber piece as Cruz’s frizzy haired Lola Cuevas takes over one of her benefactor’s vast conference centres to put her two leads — one an internationally famous movie star played by Antonio Banderas, the other a renowned character actor, played by Argentinean actor Oscar Martínez — through their paces. Escalating games of one-upmanship ensue as the actors rub each other the wrong way and Lola’s manipulative head games further exacerbate tensions as she tries to break her actors with cruel tricks of her own to get to the truth of a scene. The gags and targets are too obvious to generate big laughs, but the darker turns the film takes, together with the changing registers of the performances (what starts as farce veers more towards tragedy) redeem it somewhat.

Official Competition

A sex positive spin on a shopworn story, French drama Her Way zeroes in on a single mother called Marie (Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy) who supports herself and her teenage son Adrien (Nissim Renard) by working as a prostitute. As the film opens, Adrien has been kicked out of school and is facing a bleak future. Determined to get him into a private catering college to give him a chance to follow his true passion, Marie gets him through the interview, but then has to come up with the tuition fees, an impossible-seeming feat on the income she earns from her regular clients. With her family unwilling to help, a bank-loan out of the question, and an ungrateful son to boot, Marie – who doesn’t hide what she does – decides to put herself in ever more dangerous situations by working for a sex club operator to make more money faster.

Debut feature director Cécile Ducrocq has a good feel for how to make the world Marie is increasingly forced to work within realistically sleazy and exploitative without making any judgments on her or her co-workers. Even when we see Marie at work (and the film doesn’t stint on the realities of the job) she’s objectified not by the camera but by the anonymous men skulking around in the darker corners of the clubs or in the parked cars and vans lining Strasbourg’s red light district. Her plight is emphasised by sparing use of montage to give us a sense of the repetitious slog her work entails and Calamy’s ability to portray Marie with a dignified defiance also sees it through its more melodramatic plot turns, especially as her character’s desperation forces her to betray her own principles.

Beast is on general release from 26 August; Official Competition and Her Way are on selected release and available to stream on Curzon Home Cinema from 26 August