La Bête has a Cocteau-esque title and is almost as bewildering a film as Le Sang d’un Poète. Set across three timelines, it features a death-trap doll factory, a psychotic incel, Schoenberg, and AI. The movie occurs in the 2014, 2044 and 1904-ish. The fundamental axis of the story is simple: Gabrielle seeks out Louis, her true amour, across time and beyond death. He is a weirdo three times over. Firstly as her would-be lover who pursues her as a married woman in the nineteen hundreds, secondly as the LA incel and lastly as an elusive would-be companion in the near future. Léa Seydoux and George MacKay wrestle with the contrivances of the plot across two and a half hours. The tonal filmmaking feels erratic, at times throbbing with suspense, at others bogged down in cryptic metaphysical dialogue. Gabrielle feels threatened by an opaque disaster, or beast, which might be her lover or might be climate change. There are earthquakes and floods and vague talk of an unspecified disaster which lead to a world where emotions need to be cauterised. The nods to Lynch are overt. Does it measure up? Perhaps, perhaps not. It’s one of those films that take you on a perplexing ride from tedium to hyper-alertness. The dénouement sequence in LA towards the end of the film is brilliantly constructed and edited. But then this proves not to be the dénouement of the film, and the viewer has to come back down to earth, or rather the future, with Gabrielle having still more hoops to go through. It has the makings of a cult film, the kind of experience that some will revisit time after time, and wait for midnight screenings to accompany them through the long night, parroting some of the more risible dialogue, sitting on the edge of the seats for the moments of tension and screaming along with Seydoux at the anti-climactic finale.
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