The Beast (2024)

Direction: Bertrand Bonello
Country: France 

Bertrand Bonnello’s intelligent time-spanning love story, The Beast, is his best film to date and my favorite of 2024 so far. Blending sci-fi, romance, drama, and dystopian thriller elements with enigmatic tones, the film, based on Henry James’ short novel The Beast in the Jungle, results in an original and purely cinematic work. 

The non-linear narrative centers on the doomed love between Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux) and Louis Lewanski (George MacKay) across three different eras. In 1910, she’s a married pianist frequenting the refined Parisian artistic circles, and he’s an attentive, if cold, British admirer. in 2014, she’s a model living alone in L.A., while he’s an unstable 30-year-old American virgin tortured by rejection and frustration. The future, in 2044, is marked by absolute AI control and the availability of DNA cleanings to erase sorrows of past romances, though at the cost of possible loss of feelings. Each fragment is imbued with a tightly coiled sense of tension and repeated patterns: odd therapy sessions, consultations with clairvoyants, persistent anxieties, premonitions, and fears. An unbearable sense of loneliness also pervades. 

Structured with deliberate bewilderment, the film is a gallantly romantic and dangerously obsessive journey into past lives. It can fascinate us as much as get us lost. Cast and crew make the dramatic events believable, with Seydoux and MacKay delivering extraordinary performances, contributing heavily to 145 minutes of poignant, almost delirious complexity. 

With shades of David Cronenberg and David Lynch, the director of Nocturama (2016) and Coma (2022) gives us something special in a ferociously pleasurable film that deserves respect for its ambition. The Beast is what it wants to be: a slice of thought-provoking, nightmarish science fiction that rewards the viewer emotionally and visually.

Coma (2024)

Direction: Bertrand Bonello
Country: France

From the director of Nocturama (2016) and The Beast (2024), Bertrand Bonello, Coma is a challenging avant-garde drama with eerie tones and experimental flair. Matured and shot during the Covid lockdown, the film resulted as an expansion of a short film, aguishly exposing a world that is manifestly out of balance.

Louise Labèque, who previously collaborated with Bonello in Zombi Child (2019), portrays a teenager whose mind wanders while confined indoors. Her interest is piqued by Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), a YouTube influencer who advertises and sells a cubical object called The Revelator, leading her to experience hypnotic, if anxious, dream states. 

Coma isn't a film you can digest right away; it's a movie to enjoy or detest, at your leisure. While some may find it occasionally transfixing, others might struggle with its prolonged nightmarish limbo, which the film accurately portrays. It offers a radical reflection on isolation and the current state of the world, presented as an overstuffed pastiche with references to demons, possessions, psychopaths, serial killers, self-control, freewill, obscure dreams, and poignant realities.

While its major problem lies in the excess of disparate elements, scattered techniques, and tangled ideas, which oscillate between banality and provocation, Coma remains an open work of art with something to say about a very specific and significant time for humanity.

Nocturama (2016)

Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Country: France / Germany / Belgium

Drawing a persistent curiosity during its puzzling first half, but losing a great part of the grip in its last, “Nocturama”, an imperfect thriller directed by Bertrand Bonello (“House of Tolerance”, “Saint Laurent”), displays a contrived conjecture as a response to the uncertainty about the multiple terrorist attacks that France was recently subjected to.

In addition to directing, Bonello also wrote the script, co-produced, and composed the music for the film whose talented young cast made it look slightly better than really was.
With a structure that winds back and forth in time, the story is centered on a group of young individuals who inexplicably decide to embark on a malicious bombing plan, rounded with a couple of killings, in the center of Paris.

The plot was carried out with a tenacious conviction but didn’t go exactly as intended. Greg (Vincent Rottiers) and Fred (Robin Goldbronn), both headers of the operation, had the same fate during the mission: death. The former even makes a ghostly appearance after his death to explain what had happened to him. This was a clearly failed incursion in the supernatural.
The rest of the criminals, 10 in total, meet overnight at a downtown mall where Omar (Rabah Nait Oufella), an accomplice who works there, had prepared everything for a bizarre celebration.

Infusing a good amount of alienation in a shockingly quiet way, Bonello imagined a group of local terrorists with a variety of backgrounds. The middle-class is represented through David (Finnegan Oldfield) and Sarah (Laure Valentinelli), the lower classes through the aimless Mika (Jamil McCraven) or the ostentatious Yacine (Hamza Meziani), the upper class through the bright and well-connected Andre (Martin Petit-Guyot), and the Muslim community through Samir (Ilias Le Doré) who dreams with the promises of an illusory paradise. 

Not so profuse in ideas, Bonello sets up a few musical scenes to entertain the audiences – Omar listening to loud music, Yacine theatrically singing Paul Anka’s version of “My Way”, and Sabrina (Manal Issa) dancing “Call Me” by Blondie – and also squeezes two intruders inside the mall to join the freaky fellowship.
The celebration is turned into a nightmare when a police squad enters the building to shoot at everything that moves. No appeals to surrender, no questions, no requests, no mercy. Just erase the invaders and clean up the building.

Although leaving the motivations of the characters to our imagination and fabricating a couple of strained situations that aim to be cool, “Nocturama” has acceptable moments of suspense and exhales estrangement all around.