Critics reviews

Billie Piper’s feature debut as writer-director is a peculiar “anti-romcom” – a post-Fleabag-era tale of dysfunctional male/female relationships, tinged with musical fantasia and built around bitterly comedic theatrical dialogue. Boosted by an exceptional cast, and sharing an edgy energy with Piper’s recent TV hit I Hate Suzie, it’s an ambitious, nervy work that occasionally trips over its own stylistic heels, but still proves, as Buzz Lightyear famously discovered, that flying is essentially falling with style.

Piper, who also writes and directs (her debut), has said that the film’s aim is to, ahem, “challenge modern feminism” and deconstruct the myth of the woman who has it all. Which would have been fine if the film had displayed a pinch of psychological realism or a single note of dramatic credibility. Instead, Rare Beasts is a roll call of cartoon caricatures...

Mandy admits that all she wants is “an easy life, a five-hour day, and a nice bloke”. The ‘forbidden’ thoughts of a modern woman are laid bare; but in turn, the female chorus gets angry and shouts at her for having these very thoughts. In saying out loud what it is she really wants in life to feel happy, Mandy’s feminist values are questioned.

It’s not a perfect movie. Sometimes it moves very slowly. Other times the acting is so big it becomes pantomime. But what Piper is incredible at (in both this and I Hate Suzie) is taking the raw, intense, angry energy, that builds when you’re forced to spend too much of your life tackling the toxicity of masculinity around you, and pouring it out like a long line of acid shots for viewers to chug.

Rare Beasts is chaotic, messy and often difficult to watch – intentionally, fittingly, exhilaratingly so. Billie Piper’s directorial debut (she also wrote the screenplay) touches on themes of female insecurity, gender roles and social binds that she explored to great acclaim in last year’s TV series I Hate Suzie. While this 2019 feature may be rougher round the edges, and at times threatens to collapse under the weight of its characters’ neuroses, it’s a raw and bitingly honest watch.

Rare Beasts is a bold experiment in nerve-jangling confrontation: it has the structure and ingredients of romantic comedy but turns everything on its head... Billie Piper’s movie refuses to read the room; it ignores the traditional cues for comedy and gentleness and the learning of life lessons. It is on a spectrum of its own.

If Rare Beasts has two things going for it, they’re ambition and timeliness. Its manic set-pieces are shot and performed with no little nerve – while its particular type of anti-heroine, the young urban British woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is certainly having a cultural moment.

Rare Beasts is a strange film, at points darkly comic, at others meandering into experimental visuals and baffling dialogue that I can’t claim to have always fully understood. But although it is chaotic it never feels untethered. Piper has something to say.

Despite Rare Beast's spirited visuals, there's something stagey about the execution and it feels weighed down by its own ponderousness, rarely springing enjoyably to life. In the end, it's something to sporadically admire rather than particularly fall for.

With the very specific choices that Piper makes as a filmmaker, none of them obvious, none of them easy; not all of them land. But do not mistake this slice of nihilistic, dark-as-all-hell, tumultuous cinema for anything other than a deliberate expression of the mess we’re all in.

Rare Beasts plays out like a cinematic anxiety attack. Billie Piper’s directorial debut is frenetic, frantic and breathless, a reeling account of modern love and womanhood.

Making her directorial debut, actress Billie Piper emphatically throws caution to the wind, seeking nothing less than an unhinged portrait of modern life that strips away the niceties and clichés of the romantic comedy in order to arrive at something painful and true about love and commitment. And to be sure, there are moments where the film’s studied quirkiness achieves something close to Piper’s objective, but the movie is so maddeningly uneven and brazenly combative that it’s hard to surrender to its ambition.