Butler's Cinema Scene

Johnny Flynn, Jessie Buckley

“BEAST”  My rating: B- 

107 minutes | MPAA rating: R

A gnarly character study posing as a serial killer thriller, Michael Pearce’s “Beast” very nearly defies description.

On its most graspable narrative level it’s about a socially challenged young woman who falls hard for a local lad, then begins to suspect that he may be the murderer terrorizing the island on which they live.

But it’s also a wince-worthy portrayal of a destructive family dynamic, of sexual rapture after a life of chastity, and of a hermetically-sealed society driven off the rails by paranoia and panic.

Which is a lot to cram into one movie.  With his first feature writer/director Pearce sometimes struggles to keep it all in balance, but thanks to solid performances he delivers the modest goods.

Moll (Jessie Buckley) is such an outsider she seems a stranger even at her own birthday party.  With an explosion of unkempt red hair and a personality that seems always in retreat, she’s a perennial misfit.

Moll works occasionally as a tour guide — like filmmaker Pearce she lives on the Isle of Jersey, an outpost of stiff-upper-lip Britishness just off the hedonistic French coast — but mostly she’s  caretaker to her dimentia-riddled father. She’s more or less cast in that role by the rest of the family, especially her domineering and icily biting mother (Geraldine James), who treats her like a con on probation.

Which, in a sense, Moll is.  Fourteen years earlier she used a pair of scissors to skewer a bullying classmate. She still hasn’t lived down her reputation as violently unstable.

After a long night of dancing Moll is threatened by a local lout bent on date rape; she’s rescued by Pasquale (Johnny Flynn), a handyman and poacher who uses his rifle to scare off her attacker.  Pasquale is handsome in a sort of cut-rate Charlie Hunnam way; his scruffiness (so at odds with perfectionism displayed by Moll’s mother) is a real come-on.

So is his semi-comic assertion that he’s more French than English, that his ancestors once owned the island and that all these hoity-toity Brits are mere trespassers.

Before long Moll is in the throes of her first real sexual relationship. She’s so into Pasquale that when the cops tell her he’s a person of interest in a spate of murders of teenage girls, she lies on his behalf, telling them she was with him on the night of the most recent killing.

Little by little, though, she wonders if her beau doesn’t have a sinister side. And her life is made nearly intolerable by her fellow citizens, who regard her as a pariah for giving a suspected killer an alibi.

Pearce’s screenplay leads us into some very twisty byways; in a sense “Beast” is less about solving a mystery than in recognizing just how much animal fury can be contained in one young woman’s breast.

| Robert W. Butler