Mark Reviews Movies: BEAST

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 17, 2018

Youthful rebellion is often just a phase. It's frustration over something—seemingly or genuinely overbearing parents, peers who bully, adults who don't understand or do anything to help, feeling isolated and wanting more—transformed into snide or hurtful remarks, an attitude of superiority, or, in some cases, physical violence. Moll (Jessie Buckley), the protagonist of Beast, was once a young rebel, and it appears that she never grew out of that phase. As a 20-something adult, that youthful rebellion doesn't seem so excusable, especially when it's possible that the lives of teenage girls and justice for horrific crimes are on the line.

The potency of writer/director Michael Pearce's first feature film is that we understand Moll's continuing rebellion, and we can even sympathize with it. Here's a woman who's stuck on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, possessing no real prospects at home and seeing no possibility of escaping this place to find something better—or even just some new scenery.

Because of a major transgression in her youth, Moll's mother Hilary (Geraldine James) has retained a firm hold on the life of her daughter. After the outburst that got her expelled, the girl was homeschooled. After a decade or so of her mother trying to beat the evil out of the girl, the woman remains in her childhood home. Her obligation is to care for her ailing father, while her siblings move out, obtain jobs, get married, and have children. Meanwhile, Moll's outings are primarily for her job as a tour guide, riding a bus and, over a PA system, telling tourists about the sights of her prison of a homeland.

One of the first defining moments for the character arrives early in the film. After being confronted with the sad fact that she's little more than a stranger in her own home, she takes a piece from a broken glass and clasps it in her hand. She has to feel something—anything—other than this misery.

We can't help but feel sorry for Moll, and ultimately, that's the challenge of the film. Pearce's screenplay and Buckley's performance give us a fully realized character, force us to confront her pain, and make us hope that there's some means of escape for her on the horizon. Then, over the course of a series of more dramatic rebellions, the film reveals more about Moll's past, her capacity to justify violence, and the very real possibility that she might allow a serial killer to get away with his crimes, just so she can be with someone who says he loves her.

The possible murderer is Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a local man whom Moll meets on the beach after a night of drinking and dancing at a club. He rescues her, really. She had to leave her own birthday party when it became clear that her family and her family's friends cared more about the occasion to get together than the actual reason for the occasion. The dancing and drinking were fun, but in the cold light of the morning, the guy she was with becomes forceful in his advances. Pascal scares him off with a rifle.

Their eventual romance is Moll's newest rebellion. Her mother doesn't like Pascal, because he's of a lower class, he smells, and he threatens to disrupt her control over the family. Moll likes him because her mother hates him. There's something almost primal in her attraction to Pascal. Asked what appeals to her most, Moll says that it's because of his scent—the dirty, sweaty aroma of a man who works with his hands and only showers when he notices his own stink, if that.

In the background, there's news that a teenage girl has gone missing. The town has rallied together to search for her, but the mood is dire. The girl is the most recent one to go missing in the area in the past few years. The others were murdered, and the missing girl seems to be part of that pattern.

We come to learn a few things. Pascal is a person of interest in the case of the abducted and murdered girls. Moll learns this from her brother Clifford (Trystan Gravelle), a local cop who shows his sister her new boyfriend's police record. He has a history of violence—one instance involving a teenage girl when he was 18. Moll has her own history—the reason she was expelled, the reason her mother felt the need to keep her daughter close at hand, the reason that she's looked upon with suspicion by certain folks in the area.

The question for Moll is whether or not she'll help Pascal, who insists he's innocent but doesn't have an alibi for the night of the girl's disappearance, as the evidence keeps stacking against him. The question on Pearce's mind is if Moll is inherently capable of wrong-doing or if the circumstances of her life have turned her that way. That raises a bigger question: Either way, she is capable, so how far is willing to go for this man? The question for us is how far we're willing to take our strong, initial sympathy for Moll.

Plot-wise, the big question is whether Pascal is guilty or innocent of these crimes, but to much surprise, that mystery seems secondary to Pearce's concerns here. That's a major strength for Beast, which possesses the surface of a thriller but the heart of a thoughtful study about loneliness, resentment, and suffering.

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