The Beast (2023) Presented by: Not By Lynch

About The Beast (2023) Presented by: Not By Lynch

Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast follows Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), a woman living in a near future where artificial intelligence has come to dominate society and human emotions are considered a threat. To rid herself of her feelings, she undergoes a procedure that takes her back through her previous lives. Across three different eras — Paris in 1910, Los Angeles in 2014 and a dystopian 2044 — she repeatedly encounters Louis (George MacKay), a mysterious man with whom she shares an inexplicable connection.

Loosely inspired by Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle, Bonello’s film is a haunting exploration of love, fear and the anticipation of catastrophe. Its shifting identities, uncanny repetitions and ominous Los Angeles evoke the worlds of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, while its anxieties about artificial intelligence and the suppression of emotion bring the Lynchian into a distinctly contemporary setting. As the concluding film in Not By Lynch, The Beast offers a vision of a world in which the desire to escape fear threatens to extinguish the very possibility of human connection.

With an introduction and accompanying commissioned essay, presented in collaboration with Cinema Year Zero.