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. (more…)
