The Beast: This extraordinary sci-fi tackles sex, robots and AI

It may not be obvious that Bertrand Bonello’s extraordinary sci-fi The Beast is based on literature from more than a century ago. In the French auteur’s time-spanning love story, he tackles sex robots, artificial intelligence, and other futuristic concepts that weren’t present in Henry James’ grounded 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. What underpins both stories, though, is a core theme that Bonello believes is connecting with viewers a fraction of his age: in The Beast in the Jungle, the protagonist is so plagued by fear, they lose out on love.

When I spoke to Bonello for Zombi Child in 2019, he told me that teenagers came up to him on the street to praise Nocturama. The trend appears to be continuing. “My audience is getting younger and younger,” says the 55-year-old filmmaker with pride over a video call from his home in Paris. “At premieres for The Beast, 80 per cent of the people have been between 17 and 25.” What attracts them? “It’s the story, the editing, the music, the form. Even if the subjects are deep and serious, I try to be pop.”

By pop, Bonello means that The Beast is an enthralling, dimension-hopping epic that riffs on incel culture, fortune tellers, and love in the internet age. Starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, it includes cameos that also classify as pop: Xavier Dolan, Elina Löwensohn, Guslagie Malanda, and Dasha Nekrasova from the Red Scare podcast. Seydoux’s character even watches a minute of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers on her laptop. “Harmony has a talent for images that, in two seconds, can create something strong and insane,” says Bonello of its inclusion. “I’d not like to be in his brain, but his films are good.”

Speaking in French and English, Seydoux and MacKay star as Gabrielle and Louis, two potential lovers who co-exist in three timelines. In 1910, Gabrielle’s an upper-class Parisian with a husband, Louis is a visiting Brit who claims they’ve met before; shot on 35mm, these scenes follow the pair as they circle the other, leaving their flirtations unconsummated. In 2014, the duo are loners in a digitally shot Los Angeles; she’s a frustrated actor who cries to Roy Orbison covers, he’s an adult virgin who uploads vlogs. Then, in 2044, Gabrielle bathes in black slush in order to rid her body of past memories; upon crossing paths with Louis, she wonders how much he remembers of their shared history.

Establishing 2044 as if it were the present, the storyline cuts back and forth in time. “The Beast is very simple and, at the same time, very mathematical,” says Bonello. “It’s like a roll down a mountain. It’s a funny way to get there.” The juxtapositions between time periods, then, are calculated, and, the director insists, exactly as in the script. “In 1910, she has the fear of love. But in 2014, she sees Louis as a lost boy that has a fear of love and doesn’t realise it. He transforms it into hate.”

In the 2014 chapters, Louis’s misogynistic YouTube monologues are presented as absurd and pathetic; on both occasions I’ve seen the film, they provoked raucous laughter from those around me. However, the videos, which MacKay shot himself on an iPhone, were based off real uploads by Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old incel who killed numerous people, and then himself, with a gun in 2014. Bonello admits he wasn’t anticipating viewers to audibly chuckle. “Maybe it’s for protection,” he says. “You laugh, rather than be terrified by the horror of his words.”

Originally, Louis was written specifically for Gaspard Ulliel, an actor whom Bonello had cast as Yves Saint Laurent in Saint Laurent. Shortly before principal photography, though, Ulliel died aged 37; he was replaced by MacKay, a British actor, to avoid close resemblances. In fact, Bonello started writing The Beast in 2017 and envisioned it as a TV series starring Seydoux and Ulliel with four 60-minute episodes spanning 1910, 1936, 2014, and 2044. “I couldn’t finance it,” he explains. “So I did Zombi Child. When I went back to the script, I redid those 300 pages into a feature. I did 30 drafts.”

In the TV version, each episode was set solely in one year, meaning that Bonello came up with an entire hour unfolding in 1936. The director reveals that, in the unfilmed chapter, Gabrielle was a lesbian stand-up comedian, but he declines to provide examples of the gags. “I tried to do jokes by someone like Ricky Gervais and put them in 1936, which was a period when there was a lot of comedy about Nazism, Hitler, and women. As it was said by a woman, she could say it.” So it would have been Léa Seydoux doing Ricky Gervais? “Yeah, I liked that idea.”

When restructuring the four episodes into a single movie, Bonello invented the concept of Gabrielle purifying her DNA and revisiting her history. “I reread it and said: OK, the present must be the future, and then we go back into the past.” In Bonello’s vast filmography, he’s often toyed with the passage of time, most memorably in The House of Tolerance, a 19th-century period-drama that zooms out to reveal it’s actually the present day. However, The Beast is the director’s first foray into science-fiction.

“I realised I was imagining the future,” says Bonello. “That meant talking about our fears of the present. When I do that in Coma or The Beast, it’s about how young people are concerned about their future.” While incel culture and AI may seem like separate hot topics, they clash in 2044 as Gabrielle owns a robot partner. Could tech be a cure for loneliness, or is it actually the root cause? “There’s also a lot about that relationship in 2014,” says Bonello. “Gabrielle and Louis are always on a laptop or iPhone. They’re connected but lonely.”

As for the potential of AI providing companionship in the future, Bonello doesn’t want to go overboard. “AI is a tool,” he says. “If you have a hammer, you can put a painting on a wall, but you can hit someone on the head. The human must be the master of the tool. But now, technology is really controlling us. In our lives, AI is going to be fantastic for many things like medical research. But in the last year, we’ve seen ethical, moral, and political worries.” Does he see AI as potentially useful for filmmaking? “I mean, more and more things are possible. But the fact you could use the voice or image of a dead actor – it brings moral questions.”

Despite Bonello’s romanticisation of the theatrical experience, he eschews traditional end credits for The Beast. Instead, after the final scene, a QR code pops up. “It’s an idea I came up with during the editing,” the director explains. “After the cruelty of George and the screaming by Léa, I wanted the film to end with this feeling of loneliness.” Ironically, Bonello reveals to me that, like Christopher Nolan, he doesn’t own a smartphone – he waves an old-school Nokia in front of his webcam. “This is the phone I use. I’m protecting myself from many things.”

Bonello admits he’s concerned about the future of filmmaking, and how so many movies go directly to streaming platforms. Still, when I ask if that means he’ll attempt another TV show, he replies, “I hope not.” He adds, “Nocturama was a huge success on Netflix but not in theatres. When young people tell me how important it was for them, I know they watched it on a computer. But I cannot think about that. The Beast also loses something if watched on a computer.”

The Beast opens in UK & Irish cinemas on May 31