Critics reviews

[The Beast] is chaotic but not necessarily incoherent. Its ambiguities are purposeful and productive. The sophisticated execution... safeguards [it] from ever straying into the domain of cliched sentimentality.

The Beast doesn’t bother exploring the scientific nuts and bolts of its premise, but in a deconstructive sense, it’s as purely sci-fi as cinema gets. Each image and piece of music binds the past and future together in stirring, thought-provoking ways, turning them both into the now... Bonello crafts a perfect cinematic microcosm of being alive, in all its joys and miseries, on the constant edge of oblivion.

Equal parts sci-fi, romance, and horror, The Beast employs genre as a vehicle to advance a stark vision of the future. A fatalistic tale, however, this is not. Thrumming beneath the film’s ergonomic facades is a subversive hope: that a supposedly moribund art-form will never run out of ways to reinvent itself.

The Beast [is] the rare drama that actually bears comparison to surreal masterworks such as David Lynch’s Inland Empire... [Bonello] poses questions about love, desire, and more terrifying masculine urges, depicting moments of pure tenderness and tense, unsettling threat.

[The Beast] sometimes verges on purposefully obtuse, intentional in its audience alienation to a frustrating degree. Still, this is one of those fest films that lingers, a movie with impeccable execution and an abundance of ideas to explore after it’s over.

For all its warnings against A.I.’s dehumanizing consequences, The Beast is nonetheless alive to the creative potential of the devices we handle daily, and that rebellious freedom is the film’s greatest asset.

Disquieting and spectacular... Both Gabrielle and Louis, and the superb performers playing them, have a doll-like interchangeability that makes The Beast seem like a punk-philosophical reworking of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

[The film's] self-fracturing structure and authentically dreamlike texture – by turns foggy and piercingly lucid – recalls David Lynch’s 2006 nightmare odyssey Inland Empire, albeit with the weirdness dialled down (a bit).

For what a discomforting and despairing experience much of The Beast is, when I’ve thought back its moments of real, uncomplicated cinematic pleasure, its verve and sense of joyousness, are what mark my memories. It’s romantic, without a capital-R.

Although it is true that “The Beast” would greatly benefit from a gentle trimming in its first hour, it is easy to forgive the indulgence when the result is such a remarkable commentary on the looming threats of artificial intelligence and the dangers of glorified emotional numbness.

What [The Beast] doesn’t always have is dramatic conflict, losing its staying power in a story that takes so many unexpected turns, it can feel as if Bonello is grasping at theoretical straws rather than weaving together a strong narrative.

[A] sweeping, romantic, and ravishingly strange... The film’s true power stems from and speaks to our specifically present condition as people beset on all sides by the fears of our own imagination. By the trauma of something that already happened, or the terror of something that might.