With all the strange things going on in Bertrand Bonello's _The Beast_ as distraction, no one seems to have mentioned the weirdest: reincarnation seems to be taken for granted. Either that, or they characters live in a computer simulacrum. As a result, there is absolutely no stake in anything that happens. The pixels can just reconstitute itself and life stumbles on. It is cinema without consequence, without faith.
At least Lea Seydoux's three lives makes _The Beast_ worth watching. She plays a Parisian pianist in 1910, a Los Angeles aspiring actress in 2014, and an underemployed in an AI-ruled future. The emotions! The pageantry! (The set design is impressive too. The change in aspect ratio is a bad gimmick.)
The film is loosely based on Henry James's famous short story about a man's foreboding of impending tragedy. That fear leads him to waste his life and chance of redemption. But the sense of "longing for an exalting experience that will redeem a humdrum existence" (wikipedia) associated with the novella, and found in the other recent adaptation (with Anais Demoustier), is largely missing. Seydoux's characters are afraid all the time, but seemingly of small, irrelevant things. Loss of self via digital identity theft, or having her likeness commercialized into dolls, or to neural engineering -- but not to social media tribalism, or mind altering drugs which she takes at one point? Climate change, limited to flooding in London? Soulless modernity, restricted to the rise of Schoenberg? With so much to shoot at in the modern world, Bonello seems to have picked all the wrong targets.
One clear influence on the middle stanza of _The Beast_ no one has mentioned is Haneke's _Funny Games_, also about home invasion and double victimization by "rewinding" the scene of the heroine's escape. It is gratifying to me that the Cinema of Humiliation merchant Haneke is all but forgotten these days. Bonello isn't quite as misanthropic. But his cinematic vision is just as small-time.
