In a letter to fellow writer Morton Fullerton circa. 1900, Henry James famously wrote about the “essential loneliness” of his life, an overwhelming and powerful solitude that he felt more deeply about than even his artistic discipline. Three years later in 1903, he published a novella called The Beast in the Jungle, a work of overwhelmingly tragic, romantic fatalism about a man who lets his life (and romantic interests) pass him by in a petrified state of fear over an impending catastrophic event that he metaphorically refers to as “the beast” and is convinced is coming—proceeding to deliberately, irrationally doom himself to isolation and loneliness until it’s too late to reverse course, even as all the time and love he has wasted becomes apparent to him. The conceptual beauty and torment at the heart of this novella is obvious, and for French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance, Nocturama)—who has always deftly occupied a space between gorgeous arthouse aesthetics and more unsettling genre movie ones, and who has loosely adapted it into his new film The Beast—it has proven a fertile blueprint for a deeply felt and ambitiously imaginative century-spanning experimental science-fiction-horror melodrama.

Organized in a non-linear, overlapping-and-connecting-past-lives structure that loosely recalls the Wachowski sisters’ Cloud Atlas, The Beast primarily concerns itself with how James’s obsessive sense of alienation and foreboding didn’t die with him or his characters, but has instead infected its way through time and space. The film details this through a monotonous, near-future 2044 where A.I. has taken control of humanity and begun to counteract our cyclical sense of existential disaster and doom by eliminating the personal entirely. The thinking is that fear is, in its own way, a perverse extension of sentiment, and in order to participate in this modern world of affectless work, sex robots, and shallow nostalgia dance clubs that are no longer plagued by the ecological and sociological/gendered horrors of the old ones, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux, as striking and affecting as she’s ever been) must undergo a series of invasive treatments that will “purify” her DNA and erase any strong, residual memories or emotions. The goal is to functionally create a world where there are no extreme feelings or behaviours, only value-neutral ones (like, say, the expression on a 20th-century porcelain doll); the kind of world where a yearning, horrifying Henry James melodrama could not possibly exist. In order to rid herself of such feelings, though, Gabrielle must first experience these old memories and worlds. Bonello realizes these memories as tangible genre pastiches that allow for a certain artificial, operatic quality that he both indulges in and calls attention to, and which he telegraphs through a self-reflexive opening sequence that depicts Gabrielle as an actress on a movie set, fending herself off from a “beast” using a knife and choreography we will see again later, and which concludes with pixels blending into paint). At heart, these are lonely dreams that have been temporally constructed.

We are first introduced to Gabrielle in the context of a lavishly recreated 1910 Parisian costume drama, where Seydoux is a gender-flipped variation on James’s original protagonist: a sensitive French pianist, dutifully married to a dollmaker who has a chance reacquaintance at a party with a charming British aristocrat Louis (George Mackay) with whom she was once romantically interested 10 years earlier. Louis remembers her because she confided in him her personal secret: that she is haunted by fateful feelings and visions of disaster (ones that Bonello uses as an expressive outlet for ambitious images of the 1910 Great Flood of Paris) that prevent her from pursuing the encounter further, lest she doom someone else to her prophetic suffering. The drowning pain of this repressed love between them (vividly climaxing in an incredible fiery flood sequence) eventually finds clairvoyant rebirth in 2014 Los Angeles, where Gabrielle is now a lonely actress in a sea of isolating green screens, reflective surfaces, plastic surgery ads, and dark nightclubs, wandering the grimier side of Hollywood Boulevard in what can only be described as Bonello’s incel-horror variation on Mulholland Drive. Louis is no longer a dapper man courting an elegant, married woman, but a misogynistic stalker creepily building himself up to his day of reckoning against all women. Bonello has overtly modelled this sequence after the 2014 Isla Vista mass-murderer Elliot Rodger, going so far as to recreate the front-facing cellphone video rants / manifestos, which are at first comedic (MacKay is surprisingly good in this mode, and delivers a line about his Armani sunglasses that is frankly incredible) then become increasingly scary over time.

The sad, scary, female-centered waking dream world of this Lynchian LA eventually transform the film into what feels like one long, uncanny home invasion set-piece where the catastrophic happening is no longer expressed as merely an apocalyptic / environmental anxiety (though there is, of course, still an earthquake), but also a psychological and technological horror one. Bonello weaponizes a very modern form of male loneliness (maybe also serving as an update to vague reports on Henry James’s own self-imposed celibacy?) and ties it to the formal vocabulary of thrillers and slashers (a genre of film Bonello certainly playfully knows were often accused of misogyny) as Louis breaks his way into a hi-tech modern LA home to commit his act of grisly, gendered violence. Bonello is careful to avoid conventional catharsis with this set-piece, subversively leaning away from pandering towards its thrills by turning to strange and confidently made formal choices: off-kilter syncopated editing patterns, experimental use of security camera footage and split screen, recurring repetitions of fatalistic imagery like pigeons, dolls, and screens (including a hilarious, out-of-nowhere shoutout to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers). The film builds slow-mounting dread out of not just the violent sexism whose destruction we are already well-acquainted with, but also an even more cosmic feeling about a perverted, tragic cycle of extreme feelings of isolation and love that is both scarier and more moving.

“There must be beautiful things in this chaos,” Gabrielle says to Louis at one point, in a dream; even in her darkest, most fearful and isolated moments, she still chooses to reach and yearn for something deeper that connects us. It’s a deeply human quality to experience all that pain and suffering and doom, and yet still obsessively pursue passion and intimacy. It’s an irrational instinct that Bonello slowly feeds to us with just the right amount of hope that, premonitions be damned, these two doomed souls might find each other in another time or place, just in time to arrive at a haunting, all-consuming ending back in the 2044 dystopia reality, which can’t help but evoke another David Lynch work (which I dare not name, at risk of spoiling it). The film effectively reimagines the “essential loneliness” of Henry James’s life, his powerful premonition of a wasted life, as a genuinely chilling eternal scream that fractures and reverberates through the past, present, and future of both our real history and genre history.

Part of my TIFF23 coverage over at Blood Knife.

Full discussion on my podcast SLEAZOIDS.