Growing up and living on the tiny island of Jersey can’t make it easy to escape your past. Located off the coast of Britain, writer and director Michael Pearce, making his feature debut with “Beast,” presents the picturesque enclave as one guarded by a noted strain of conservatism, if not oppression. Certainly, Moll (Jessie Buckley) sees her own life bound by the rigid rules laid out by her mother Hilary (Geraldine James), who keeps hawk-like watch over her daughter following a harrowing incident that haunts their relationship years later. Soon, however, an outsider comes into their lives, unmooring Moll from a life of few options, and promising a bright future, but not before she takes a hard look at the things she thought she left behind. “Beast” ripens with potential at its premise, but never quite fully knows what to do with the psychological and emotional territory it traverses.
Pascal (Johnny Flynn) is everything that Moll doesn’t have in her life. After a night out partying, Pascal comes to her aid from a particularly aggressive date, and the two become almost instantly inseparable. With a scruffy beard, and rifle slung across his shoulder, he poaches illegally, smokes cigarettes wherever he damn well pleases, but most importantly, ignores Hilary’s chilly disapproval. Pascal and Moll fall fast in love, becoming an island unto themselves, but unease lingers in the background. A string of brutal murders have claimed the lives of multiple young women in Jersey, and Pascal is a suspect, a fact that Moll learns from Clifford (Trystan Gravelle), a police officer with his own conflicted intentions toward the young woman.
“Beast” works best in its opening half, as Pearce creates a disquieting tension that’s aided by a smart screenplay, which finds a careful balance of withholding key character information and parceling it out at the right time. In its early frames, the film creates a mood not unlike “The Wicker Man,” displaying a sense that something is off with the people in Jersey, and even with Moll. Instead of articulating directly what lies at the root of the off balance mood, “Beast” allows it to unfurl in the interactions between its characters, and the underlying motivations of their actions. By contrast, the film begins to fall apart when it’s forced to start resolving its narrative.
As the picture heads into the second and third acts, the compelling atmosphere that’s established starts to fade as the story turns procedural. At the heart of “Beast” is the question of whether or not you could love someone who might have something horrific in their history, and the key mistake made by Pearce is to provide an answer. When the ambiguity starts being lifted, the reductive conclusions provide a far from satisfying resolution to what starts as a fascinating portrait of social and emotional repression and ostracisation. The script also flirts with ideas about the relationship between manipulation and misogyny but leaves those concerns behind as it starts to draw the threads together for a climactic finale that strains credulity and breaks the effective spell cast over the proceedings.
Credit for helping to keep the proceedings anchored falls too Buckley and Flynn. The actress does a terrific job at finding the internal turmoil of a character who remains otherwise unpredictable throughout much of the picture. Flynn, perhaps best known for his role on the Netflix comedy “Lovesick,” shows a great range here as the romantic hero who doesn’t take long to show a charcoal darkness to his charm. Both provide the kind of complex turns the picture needs, but unfortunately, the script winds up letting them down. Meanwhile, a technical nod should be made to cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, who makes several interesting choices regarding camera moves and framing, which serve to heighten the disquieting tenor of the film.
“Beast” takes a storytelling gamble, presenting itself as a psychological whodunit, before pivoting toward a more genre oriented plot. The risk doesn’t quite pay off, undercutting its thematic potential for thrills that aren’t quite that effective. Nevertheless, Pearce does display a unique talent in establishing a tone where anything can happen, and often does. “Beast” is not short on surprises, even if they don’t all work, but the biggest one of all may be the filmmaker, who marks himself as one to watch. Just like Moll, there’s no telling where he’ll go next. [C]
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