British writer-director Michael Pearce makes an impressive
feature debut with “Beast,” a psychological thriller about Moll (Jessie
Buckley), a timid twenty-something woman whose desperate
desire for escape leads her tumbling headlong into danger.
Stifled by life under the thumb of her snootily affluent
family and domineering mother (Geraldine James), Moll cultivates her rebellious
side as she strikes up a passionate romance with the mysterious Pascal (Johnny
Flynn), a scruffy-haired, smolderingly charismatic loner with a passion for
hunting.
Meanwhile, there’s a serial killer on the loose who’s been
strangling young girls in the area — all coincidentally right around Moll’s age
— and Pascal just so happens to be a chief suspect in the investigation.
Moll’s relationship with Pascal offers the hint of danger
that she’s been craving, and if she’s able to utterly scandalize her family
while she’s at it, all the better. But “Beast” isn’t just a simple whodunit, moving
beyond its “Sleeping With the Enemy,” B-movie premise as Peace peels back the
layers of Moll’s own impulse toward destruction.
We learn more details of an incident from her past, when she
viciously stabbed a schoolmate who’d been bullying her with a pair of scissors.
She claimed she was only defending herself, but that might just be one side of
the story.
Pearce takes his time, and the film’s deliberate pace gives
the audience plenty of time to grow frustrated by Moll’s spectacularly bad
decisions. But we’re always hooked thanks to Buckley’s riveting performance.
Shifting from wounded vulnerability to an increasingly animalistic rage, she
gives this gothic horror story an unexpectedly potent bite.
This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2018.
