Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Few movies come as beautifully haunted as The Beast. Contrary to the title, though, the intoxicating new film from Bertrand Bonello is not a hokey horror movie. In the drab, Netflixy language of genre, it is closer to a sci-fi romance. But that still doesn’t capture this remarkable three-sided one-off: a glinting pyramid of past, present and future built on star turns in triplicate from Léa Seydoux.That movies mislead is made clear straight away. In the opening seconds, Bonello goes behind the scenes to a green-screen film shoot. But opera, pop music and the internet all spellbind too in a story that passes through three sets of time and place. And then, fittingly, there’s artificial intelligence. Though the film is deeply human, you almost picture it as a response to a prompt thrown at ChatGPT: “Make me dreamlike, hyper-modern cinema from a story actually based on a spare 1903 novella by Henry James.”That book is The Beast in the Jungle, the cautionary tale that one section of the film loosely adapts. The setting is society Paris circa 1910, where a character is cursed by intimations of doom. This is Gabrielle (Seydoux), married but pursued by a lovelorn old acquaintance, Louis (George MacKay). The repressed longing and Belle Époque costumes are the stuff of the pristine period drama the movie seems to be. But Bonello also asks us to divide our attention. Because elsewhere, the year is 2044, and Seydoux is now another Gabrielle, left unemployed like most of the species by AI. Yet the anonymous city where she lives is orderly and cool to the touch. By way of fun, a nightclub reconstructs the old days, year by year. “1972” features groovy frugging. In “1980” there are stark dances to “Fade to Grey”. An impeccable stylist, Bonello makes the music look great. He is also a filmmaker willing to come head-on at the jagged edges of modern culture. (His 2016 demi-thriller Nocturama was an uneasy portrait of Gen Z terrorism.) And so, between past and future, we also arrive in a roughly contemporary Los Angeles. Now Gabrielle is — of course — an aspiring actor. The memory of David Lynch’s dark masterwork Mulholland Drive is knowingly conjured, but with nightmares of Bonello’s own. At one point, this Gabrielle must deal with a laptop besieged by a cacophony of pop-ups. The film could easily feel the same: an overstuffed racket. In fact, the passage between time zones is lucid and elegant while losing nothing in raw daring. History repeats, endlessly but mercurially. Now we fear fires and rising seas. In 1910, the real floods that submerged Paris are restaged in the most oddly moving sequence I’ve seen this year.All kudos to Bonello. Not everything works, but more than enough does. And Seydoux is brilliant. Her chemistry with MacKay has a mournful shimmer that makes real the echoing themes of loneliness. It also gives mere hand-holding a jolt of sexual energy.Here in 2024, everyone in movies is gripped by melancholy dread about the future. The Beast has its own take on that. Change, it suggests, is mostly an illusion. And Bonello doesn’t bombard us with the desperate pleas to get back to the big screen that so many films now sneak into their messaging. Instead, this sensual, cerebral work simply reminds us what is possible when ambitious filmmakers put their mind to it — and how long the result can stay in ours.★★★★★In UK cinemas from May 31
