Director: Bertrand Bonello
A near-future machine that promises to erase pain instead pulls its subject through echoes of the same encounter across three different centuries.
What is The Beast about?
In a future where feeling too much has become socially dangerous, Gabrielle agrees to undergo a procedure that purifies her DNA by immersing her in memories of past lives, hoping to be freed from emotions she can no longer manage. The process keeps returning her to variations of the same man, Louis, and the same unresolved connection, first in Belle Époque Paris, then in 2010s Los Angeles, then in the sterile present. Each timeline recasts their bond under different pressures, from the constraints of a doll-making workshop to the isolation of a house sitting job, and the film uses the repetition to circle a single question about whether intense feeling is a flaw to be purified away or the last thing worth protecting. It builds its tension less through plot twists than through the accumulating dread of a pattern the characters cannot break.
Cast & crew
Léa Seydoux plays Gabrielle across all three timelines opposite George MacKay as Louis, with Guslagie Malanda, Martin Scali, Dasha Nekrasova, Elina Löwensohn, Marta Hoskins and Julia Faure rounding out the ensemble. Director Bertrand Bonello reteams several of his regular collaborators for a production shot across Canada and France.
Context & significance
The Beast loosely adapts Henry James's novella The Beast in the Jungle, transposing its theme of a life spent waiting for disaster into a speculative story about a society that treats strong emotion as a risk to be medically managed, told across three distinct historical settings.
Where & how to watch
The Beast streams on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles after you log in with a free account; the film's page can be browsed without signing in, and the K-Time interface itself is presented in Farsi.