WLR #4
The Beast
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
“There must be beautiful things in this chaos.” – Gabrielle
Rarely do I write from this place, from feeling rather than analysis…
But forget sound design, costumes, sets—all of it. Out the window! The Beast makes you feel, and feeling things is good. There’s a clarity to it as well, one that reveals itself only you've surrendered to it. If can just get one movie like this a year, I can keep trudging along. I can suffer through the mediocrity of everything else—the endless Godzilla vs. Kong sequels, the daily grind of my own life, the staleness of trying to get published—and feel as though it’s all good.
The Beast is about love and fate and the choices we make and the choices we avoid. In short, it’s about everything. It doesn’t patronize its audience or beg for approval either. It simply offers itself up, brimming with ideas about sacrifice and the existential weight of our decisions, and asks you to sit with it. To live in the discomfort. To be haunted by it. I went into this movie blind, knowing nothing except that Léa Seydoux was on the poster, and what I got was an experience—everything I didn’t know I needed. It was like nothing I’ve seen but everything I’ve loved. Like Eternal Sunshine retold as a psychological thriller; a Lynchian fever dream that, to me, felt like my own Mulholland Drive.
MacKay and Seydoux are revelations, the glue that holds the unwieldy structure in place. MacKay, shifting seamlessly between centuries—from a silver-tongued aristocrat to a deranged incel, to something like a robot-zombie hybrid in the future—gives a wonderful performance. It’s as if the film is asking through his character: how much of who we are is simply where we’ve been placed? The best storytelling uses characters to get it’s point across. This does that in spades. And Seydoux, navigating the melancholia of a pianist in 1910 and the recklessness of a hedonistic actress in 2014, gives a masterclass in walking the line between restraint and abandon. Her dual performance blurs the boundaries between past, present, and future, all while preserving Gabrielle. It’s an Oscar worthy performance that will be overlooked by the academy, as will the movie.
The final act in 2044 crystallizes the film’s central question: is emotion worth sacrificing for the sake of serenity? The two lead characters, now navigating a dystopian future, must confront the erasure of their experiences in the name of societal reintegration. It’s here where The Beast becomes almost unbearably relevant—where the messy, chaotic humanity at its core smashes against the sterile, digitized future that we know awaits. The film doesn’t provide answers because it’s not trying to. It’s asking whether we are prisoners of our circumstances or if we can transcend them. And its ultimate message, if there is one, is simple: live. Live in the mess, in the chaos, in the terror of the unknown. In the moment.
The Beast is the first masterpiece of 2024.
Four stars
The Fall Guy
Directed by David Leitch
Action-comedy. It’s a genre hybrid that should, deliver on both fronts: the adrenaline rush of action and laughs. Yet so many films lately think that simply being unserious is the same as being funny. It’s not. Slapping a veneer of irony on top of explosions doesn’t create comedy—it just makes the action seem weightless, as if the film isn’t even sure what it’s trying to be. This is the central failure of The Fall Guy. Yes, it has action, and yes, it has moments where the leads exchange witty banter. But it doesn’t have that crucial blend of the two that makes for a true action-comedy.
The film has redeeming qualities. In fact, it has two major ones: its leads. With those two you can get away with a lot. Frankly, you could fill half the runtime with Ryan and Emily just staring into each other's eyes and the audience would come away relatively satisfied. The action set pieces are impressive. There’s genuine spectacle in the choreography and effects, the kind of high-octane visuals that are meant to dazzle and, at times, succeed.
But where’s the comedy? Where’s the risk?! Watching it, I found myself thinking of Pineapple Express. In Pineapple Express, the comedy was actual comedy—jokes that landed, irreverence that went too far in all the best ways. Meanwhile, the action wasn’t just filler. The guns went off in homes, in warehouses, and the chaos felt real, all while you were doubled over laughing. Danny McBride as a human punching bag, Seth Rogen and James Franco navigating a plot far larger than their capacity to handle—it all worked because both the action and the comedy were operating at full force. It was imperfect. It’s sad how rare that kind of balance has become.
I wasn’t disappointed by The Fall Guy. It’s exactly the movie you think it is: a by-the-numbers action film elevated by its stars and punctuated by the occasional “boom.” The film’s not even really trying to be a great action-comedy. It’s just trying to be a lighthearted action movie, and I guess that’s something…
P.S. as a supposed homage to stuntmen, I’m not sure it accomplished that.
Two-and-a-half-stars
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Directed by Guy Richie
Again this week with the action-comedy! This time, with Guy Ritchie at the helm—a director who has successfully pulled off a decent action-comedy before, one that earns its stripes on both sides of the hyphen. He’s also delivered some of the most unwatchable trash to ever hit my screen. He’s a mixed bag. Sherlock Holmes? Underrated. Snatch? Undisputed classic. Revolver? One of the worst films of all time.
So where does The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare land? Somewhere in the middle. It’s okay. A straightforward action flick with some of Ritchie’s signature quirks, but nothing too outlandish. He reigns in his more verbose, slapstick sensibilities this time around, which makes for a more polished film than some of his others. It’s not a comedy in the sense of laugh-out-loud moments, but there’s a lightness, a sort of dry British wit that permeates the dialogue, giving it that typical Ritchie flair.
It’s a top-tier Guy Ritchie film, for whatever that’s worth
Two-and-a-half stars
