Film reviews: The Beast | Sting | The Young Woman and the Sea

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay give haunting performances in The Beast, Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi parable about the dangers of AI, writes Alistair Harkness​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Beast (15) ****

Sting (15) **

Young Woman and the Sea (PG) **

The BeastThe Beast
The Beast

A novella by Henry James may not seem like the most natural starting point for a sci-fi parable about the dangers of AI, but all credit to French co-writer/director Bertrand Bonello for seeing something in James’ 1903 text The Beast in the Jungle and spinning it into a wild, decades-spanning inter-dimensional epic about the tech industry’s insidious destruction of everything that makes life worth living. Where James’ story charted the tragedy of a man who wastes his life paralysed by a fear that some inscrutable calamity is going to destroy him in the future, The Beast casts Léa Seydoux as a woman living in a future where AI has eliminated fear altogether. In this world, time-stamped in the film as 2044, humans who want better lives and careers are required to undergo DNA purification to eliminate all the sources of anxiety that make them dysfunctional, a process Seydoux’s Gabrielle is reluctant to undergo. Instead she opts for a more therapeutic approach in which her past lives are scanned for sources of historical trauma that can be treated to alleviate the sorrow she feels, a process that takes her back to Paris in 1910 and Los Angeles in 2014. In all three timelines – 2044, 2014 and 1910 – she crosses paths with George MacKay’s Louis, a thwarted soulmate whose presence Bonello treats as a harbinger of the innate dread she feels about a life devoid of imagination.

Although the Henry James of it all can feel a little stifling during the first part of the film as Seydoux and MacKay swan around the salons of Belle Époque Paris in period finery pontificating on Gabrielle’s passionless marriage to a doll factory owner, Bonello makes judicious use of disorientating flash-cuts that jump us back-and-forth in time to keep us off balance. When he eventually lands in 2014, though, the film morphs into a David Lynch-inflected nightmare as Gabrielle – now an aspiring model/actress – house-sits in the Hollywood hills while Louis, reincarnated as a toxic “incel”, stalks her in between creating paranoid, misogynistic vlog posts. What one has to do with the other is a puzzle to which the film’s 2044-set finale doesn’t provide explicit answers, but that’s part of its appeal. Bonello’s fever-dream approach is so richly imagined, so hauntingly acted by Seydoux and MacKay, that getting lost in its abstractions reinforces its effectiveness.

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Alyla Browne stars in Sting, a semi-tongue-in-cheek creature feature about a comic-book-loving goth kid (Browne) who finds an alien spider in her run down Brooklyn apartment block and, unaware of its extraterrestrial provenance, decides to name it Sting and keep it as a pet. That it promptly starts devouring her neighbours and family members is no barrier to the girl, named (but of course) Charlotte, being centred as the heroine. Then again, plot logic isn’t much on writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner’s mind as he pulls inspiration from all the usual sources without really shaking things up enough to transcend the clichés of the genre.

Groaning Hemingway-riffing title notwithstanding, Young Woman and the Sea goes to such dubious lengths to force this story about the first woman to swim the English Channel into a one-size-fits-all underdog sports movie template that it does a disservice to its subject, Trudy Ederle. Played by Daisy Ridley, Ederle was a gold and double-bronze medalist at the 1924 Olympic Games, but here has been needlessly stripped of her achievements to make a more simplistic drama about overcoming the patriarchy-imposed barriers placed in her way when she decided to swim the Channel a year later. Among those barriers is Christopher Eccleston, dusting off his Scottish accent as her embittered coach Jabez Wolffe, a failed Glaswegian Channel swimmer who sabotages her first try. The gap between attempts has also been shrunk from a year to a couple of weeks, something this glossy Jerry Bruckheimer-production gets around by throwing in lots of bogus hijinks that further make a mockery of everything Ederle achieved.

The Beast, Sting and Young Woman and the Sea are in cinemas from Friday. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is out now.

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