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The Beast
La Bête
2024 146 min France, Canada, Switzerland 18+
★7.1
Science Fiction, Drama, Romance
Director: Bertrand Bonello
🎭 Based on
«The Beast in the Jungle»
byHenry James
Trailers
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Teaser
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Description
In the near future where emotions have become a threat, Gabrielle finally decides to purify her DNA in a machine that will immerse her in her past lives and rid her of any strong feelings. She then meets Louis and feels a powerful connection, as if she had known him forever.
Budget:
$7.5M
US Gross:
$413,978
Worldwide:
$760,979
Starring
Léa Seydoux
Actor
George MacKay
Actor
Guslagie Malanda
Actor
Awards
Venice Film Festival 2023
— Golden Lion
César Awards 2025
— Best Visual Effects
Key opinion
La Bête is an ambitious but polarizing sci-fi drama that explores the conflict between human emotion and sterile, AI-governed futures. While some praise its stylistic flair and philosophical depth, others find the long runtime and repetitive narrative to be an empty, incoherent exercise in art-house imitation.
| Runtime | The narrative's 2.5-hour runtime feels excessive, with many viewers finding the repetitive structure and over-explicated themes to be exhausting and unnecessary. | |
| Acting | Critics are deeply divided on the leads' performances; some find their chemistry compelling across eras, while others argue the characters lack passion and fail to connect. | |
| Originality | The film utilizes an aesthetic heavily inspired by David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, which some appreciate as sophisticated art-house styling, while others dismiss as superficial decoration lacking substance. | |
| Theme | The film offers a provocative, if pessimistic, thematic exploration of whether human emotions—even painful ones—are essential to our identity or merely flaws to be excised by technology. | |
| Screenplay | The screenplay suffers from inconsistent writing, oscillating between profound philosophical musings and dialogue that occasionally devolves into pretentious or redundant psycho-babble. |