Beast blends psychological thriller with island love story

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This article was published 10/08/2018 (2988 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this cool, controlled, bleakly beautiful drama from debut writer-director Michael Pearce, Moll (Jessie Buckley) is a young woman, drifting through her days, who is suddenly faced with a choice.

The first onscreen words spoken to Moll by her demanding mother are, “I need more from you.” The first words spoken to Moll by a ferally handsome stranger who appears out of nowhere are, “You’re wounded. I can fix that.”

This is a familiar cinematic story, then. Hemmed in by a controlling family and a repressive community, a young woman is liberated by her reckless sexual passion for a rough-edged outsider. But Pearce is playing — daringly but not always successfully — with genre expectations, and, significantly, with gender.

Beast is part psychological thriller, part crime procedural, part combustible love story — the sexual chemistry between the two lead characters could power their home island of Jersey, located between England and France. There’s also a hint of Grimms’ grim fairy tales.

Moll works as a tour guide and helps to care for her ailing father. She is wooed by a dull, socially acceptable suitor who’s in the local police force, ignored and belittled by her successfully launched siblings, and constantly upbraided by her mother Hilary (Geraldine James), who manages to be both cold and smothering.

At one point, Hilary chastises Moll for letting her family down after she’s “come so far.” Far from what is the question, of course. There is some covered-over past event, but with a flare of tangled red hair and a face that can be unreadable or painfully expressive, Moll remains enigmatic.

So, too, does the stranger, who is eventually revealed as Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a sometime rabbit poacher who’s “good with his hands.” Pascal is a native-born working-class Jerseyman, while Moll’s family seems to be part of a recent influx of upper-middle-class Brits looking for a tax haven. Moll is mesmerized when Pascal, attractively covered in sweat and dirt, messes up the pristine cream carpet in her mother’s sitting room, or defies the dress code at a stuffy country club.

The stakes go way beyond star-crossed romance, however, when Pascal becomes a suspect in a string of brutal murders.

Moll protects him, but is this because she believes he’s innocent, or because she suspects he might be a kindred spirit? As Moll and Pascal spiral into an unpredictable folie a deux, we’re left wondering who the hunter is and who the prey, and what the film’s ominous title might mean.

There are echoes of Terrence Malick’s Badlands here, and befitting the Channel Island location, there seem to be French influences — Claude Chabrol and maybe the darker films of Francois Ozon — along with a quintessentially English interest in social class.

Pearce’s approach is slightly stylized. Even when things get visceral — and they really do – he keeps things at a cool, careful remove. There’s a dream-like quality to much of the film, underlined by an isolated island setting that feels deliberately out of time. The action takes place in the present – indicated by thumping dance music and current tech — but Moll’s dresses and her family’s home seem like holdovers from the prim 1950s, and there’s something vaguely anachronistic, perhaps 19th-century, about Pascal as well.

There are structural issues — the plot twists come too late to really resonate — and some awkward tonal shifts.

Compelling performances hold this Beast together. Flynn is intriguing: is his Pascal a cinematic “bad boy” or a genuinely violent man? But this is Moll’s show, and Buckley’s breakout performance is powerful and unsettling.

There’s an extraordinary moment when Moll turns on two men who are threatening her and just roars with decades of repressed rage, causing them to flee. It’s a naked expression of female emotion, and that’s what forms the dark centre of this flawed but fascinating film.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca