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…

Compelling evidence that every major arthouse director should be required to make their own “Cloud Atlas” before they die, Bertrand Bonello’s sweeping, romantic, and ravishingly strange “The Beast” finds the French director broadening — and in some cases challenging — the core obsessions of his previous films into a sci-fi epic about the fear of falling in love.

Split into three lightly intercut parts that trace the connection between two star-crossed souls (embodied by Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) from 1910 to 2044, Bonello’s latest and most accessible movie begins by literalizing the same basic premise that has undergirded previous work like “House of Tolerance” and “Zombi Child”: The past is always present (a dialectic explored here with the help…

“Besides, we fucked it all up. Nothing can happen to us now, the catastrophe is behind us. We used to have everything.”

If you, like me, hold the idea that an excess of technology is slowly but surely killing every single aspect of what makes us human and, perhaps more tragically, what makes art a uniquely human endeavour… then you are going to love this!

Or at least be severely traumatised by it, which is undoubtedly better than the horrifying alternative of walking out of a movie theatre feeling absolutely nothing.

Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast follows a woman named Gabrielle through a few of her past lives (namely in 1910, 2014 and 2044), all of which are fatefully intertwined, in…

This will undoubtedly divide opinion once it’s widely available. Many have already mentioned its Lynchian storytelling tendencies, and I suppose it creates a similar intriguing, ambiguous atmosphere. At times, it feels quite modern-Cronenberg-esque. Long, insightful stretches encapsulate the fear of intimacy and affection. Its themes are so broad—social dread, romantic dissatisfaction, and loneliness—and, because the film is divided into multiple sections, there were definitely moments that captured me much more than others.

Attempting to dissect much of it would be pointless, especially after only one viewing. It's such a unique artistic effort that it's impossible to understand everything on the first watch. an allegory for human connection that is as balsy as they get, and some may claim that it…

Evergreen (screen). Don’t have much to add on to my first review. Still in awe that the sensitivity and dread of Henry James’ “essential loneliness” was not only revived and channeled through such aggressively, experimentally post-modern arthouse sci-fi horror aesthetics by an ambitious, imaginative Frenchman who obviously put Twin Peaks: The Return on his Sight and Sound ballot, but how effective of a straight up heart-wrenching melodrama it is despite all the obvious sentimentality of its cosmic past lives century-spanning romantic connection premise and the strange tonal jumps/unreal details/waking dream world editing patterns it's playfully surrounded with that it would be easy for some to dismiss as irony... Had a pit in my stomach the entire time rewatching knowing the…