This Genre-Hopping 2024 Masterpiece Is a Lynchian Nightmare

There are few movies that can hit a nerve quite like the works of David Lynch. But Bertrand Bonello delivered a science-fiction movie that was released everywhere this past year and came closer than ever to reflecting the uniquely nightmarish qualities of Lynch’s recent films. The Beast, originally released in 2023 and distributed widely in 2024, is a surreal, romantic, dystopian thriller that stars Léa Seydoux and George McKay. The movie is very loosely based on a 1903 novella, The Beast in the Jungle, by Henry James. The novel concerns a man whose obsession with his fatalist philosophy keeps him from ever feeling passionate or motivated enough to accomplish anything with his life. The Beast takes only loose threads from this novel, modernizing that idea to communicate the dangers of this self-imposed feeling of stagnation, inferiority, or doom that can lead to externalized violence. Bonello took these thematic threads and wove them into a terrifying vision of humanity’s bleak future, and one of the most striking movies of the decade so far.

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