The Beast

14/06/2026

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The Nature of the Scream

 
Henry James’ ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ is an obscure story of possibility, of the central character believing that “something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little whether the crouching beast was destined to slay him or to be slain.” Bertrand Bonello’s film, The Beast, is an adaptation that wonders what possibility happens to be, dramatising it just as James intellectualised it. If the future is unknown, then, as James says, whether it leaves us slain or doing the slaying, whether it gives us a sense of dread or a sense of hope, it won’t be dependent on the future, but on our perspective upon it. Of course, some people are optimistic or pessimistic based on probability. The person who goes to bed at night, aware that the bailiffs may call the next morning, hits the pillow with more dread than the one who is expecting a knock on the door from the postman with various birthday gifts. But even here, the person anticipating the bailiffs may insist to themselves that the bailiff will be too busy to pay them a visit the next day, and, by the time they do, the person will have been able to pay off their debts. Meanwhile, the person awaiting birthday gifts may dread the disappointment of a loved one forgetting such an important day in their life.
Bonello doesn’t just fret with the characters over their futures — he partly sets his film there, with the movie taking place in 1910 (James’ story was published in 1903), 2014, and 2044, as if he wanted to capture an aspect of fear as realisation — a central feature in science fiction and partly why it often segues into horror. When Bonello speaks of Cronenberg, Romero and Carpenter, he says “they themselves believed the fear they were bringing to the screen, and they worked with genre because that allowed them to articulate their anxieties about the world—and often those concerns are political.” (Reverse Shot) By adopting horror and science fiction, they could offer an angle that incorporates personal terror within a broader hope, or vice versa. In other words, the character could be in a terrible predicament but manage to escape it, even if society looks doomed, as at the end of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Equally, an environment can seem quite benign even if characters are threatened within it — as Halloween illustrates. The Beast, by mixing different genres, offers fear blended with hope, yet in a far more unusual and epistemologically unsettling way than in a clearly generic horror or science fiction film.
The central difference between the person who suspects someone will forget their birthday and the person who reckons the bailiffs won’t turn up the next morning is disposition. But what they both share are emotions that can play havoc with feelings based on probability. They both react unpredictably. It is this problem with emotions in humans that The Beast addresses and to which it gives dramatic form. In 2044, the environment has been saved by AI, while human beings have been semi-sacrificed: most humans are only allowed to do simple jobs, as they can’t be trusted with more sophisticated ones. They are unable to do them without feeling, and this will get in the way of reason. Central character Gabrielle is frustrated doing menial tasks, but can only escape the work if she foregoes her emotions: “Today, there are no biased decisions made by people who are annoyed or depressed”, the AI system informs her. All she has to do is have her DNA cleaned of past lives and experiences, and she can find herself promoted to higher-end employment. Gabrielle is undeniably scared, but the AI insists that she will still be able to feel things; only with a greater serenity, which sounds an awful lot like a drug you can never fail to continue taking.
Such a trade-off is a Faustian pact, as  modest ambition, and the relatively easy life commonly to be found in science fiction works from Brave New World, where Soma tranquillizes the populace, to The Stepford Wives, where the husbands have the most compliant of spouses because they have all been turned into robots. In The Beast, as Gabrielle starts the purification process and assesses her past life in 1910 Paris, and then to another in 2014 Los Angeles, she meets at the nightclub Louis (an incarnation of the figures from the previous lives), and they both share their doubts about the purification. This plays like a variation of love at first sight as deja vu, with both characters unaware of their past existences in each other’s company, while the viewer becomes increasingly aware they have shared histories and these will be eradicated by the process. If in Dawn of the Dead, we know that the characters are in a malign environment, one they must do their best to navigate, and in Halloween, the characters are in a benign one that contains simply a malevolent presence, in The Beast, Gabrielle doesn’t quite know the world she is in, nor what she should trust in it. In the opening scene, Lea Seydoux is in a green-screen room as a director (Bonello’s voice) explains the layout as it would be perceived by viewers. At the end of the sequence, she has to let out a very loud scream. The scene is a comment on the artificiality practised in many a contemporary work, but also captures an aspect of the predicament that The Beast generally offers. What is this thing that generates fear, and should Gabrielle accept the reality of mid-21st-century life, and assume that her past is a drag on her future, or should she see that whatever meaning her existence has is closely associated with a person capable of feeling depressed and annoyed?
  In James’ story, the central character is John Marcher, and the setting the Edwardian era, but it stays within the one time frame as the years pass by. The story shows a man who is so determined to escape a fear he cannot comprehend that he doesn’t wish to engage anyone in this potential and terrible catastrophe. If he doesn’t know if the beast in the jungle will slay him or he will be slain, best to venture alone: “the definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature, and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger hunt.” By the conclusion, the fear was fear itself, and Marcher loses the woman he had loved as he discovers that, in many ways, the very thing he found so fearful was the future that would become his past: “something — and this reached him with a pang —that he, John Marcher hadn’t; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher’s end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant…”
Speaking of the story, Bonello has said: “What’s great about the idea of premonition, of a sign that precedes something, is that you don’t know what the beast is. You don’t see it, and it’s not an actual beast, so you can put a lot of fears into the word ‘beast’, just as the characters can put a lot of fears into the word ‘catastrophe’. Something is going to happen.” (RogerEbert) The main difference is the nature of each version’s tragic irony. In the story, it rests on a man who fears what turned out to be his own future as the woman dies and he is bereft, aware of how much he loved a woman and how he had lost this love because he was too fearful to commit to it. In Bonello’s film, the tragic irony is contained within the science-fiction concept. Gabrielle’s procedure fails while Louis’s succeeds, so at the moment she realises this is the man from her past lives, she sees that the treatment has worked for him. They will not be able to feel the same things together, and she lets out the very scream we heard at the beginning of the film in the green-screen room.
Bonello moves from the nuance of James to the bluntness of the horror movie, with Seydoux becoming nothing if not a scream queen, though he turns the former shriek that represents a categorical fear, even if it isn’t shown, to a psychic scream that is manifest. In other words, while at the beginning of the film the director explains in detail what Seydoux will be reacting to, even if she cannot see it as a beast encroaches, at the end of the film, she will see very much in front of her a man she knows she cannot now reach, as his feelings have become muted, while her own are pronounced. The screams have very different functions, while the typical horror scream has a clear one. Bonello plays with the scream’s assumptions in two ways. In the first, by absencing the digitised manifestation of the monster, and in the second by making the scream a product of Gabrielle’s horror in the face of emotional asymmetry. These are very distinct screams, and while we might think that Bonello is absorbing melodrama into a writer who is well-known for his discretion, we might also think of Peter Brooks’ inclusion of James’ work in The Melodramatic Imagination, and also how rare it is that a scream carries such discrete meanings.  Bonello is invoking, perhaps just a little, the complexity of David Lynch’s screams, from Laura Dern’s reaction to news on the radio in Wild at Heart, to Sheryl Lee’s scream in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the silent scream outside the diner in Mulholland Drive, to the reaction of the nurse in The Elephant Man first encountering the titular character’s presence. It makes sense Bonello would be an admirer of the American director, saying “…[what] inspires me in David Lynch is that he allows himself everything. He inspires me in his freedom,” even if he also says when asked if he consciously took from Twin Peaks, “Conscious? Not really.” (HeyUGuys) But given no director has offered a greater range in the scream’s possibilities, it would be unlikely that Lynch’s approach to the scream would have no association at all, but one way of understanding The Beast is to see two very different sensibilities at play on the material: Lynch’s and James’s.
      When Brooks quotes James in The Melodramatic Imagination, it could come from the mouth of Bonello. “I have the imagination of Disaster…and see life as ferocious and sinister.” Bonello reckons, “what’s good about science fiction is that you’re creating a world, inventing a world, and you’re talking about your fear of the present — of today. I’m not alone in this of course, but my fear of today is very huge.” (In Review) Brooks, speaking about the ending of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, notes the absence of event met by the ‘lurid’ nature of its conclusion as Marcher flings himself face down on May Bartram’s grave. Brooks speaks of the moral occult and, while seeing it in Gothic literature, also sees it in James’ work. Brooks observes it in the “realm of inner imperatives and demons, and the Gothic novel dramatises again and again the importance of bringing this occult into man’s waking, social existence, of saying its meaning and acting out its force.” (The Melodramatic Imagination) In the story, we see “Marcher’s void and menace are imaged as ‘Beast in the Jungle’ of course makes the relation of the moral occult to his unconscious compelling — a return of the repressed — the result is the melodrama of hysteria and hallucination.”  Brooks compares the work to, among others, Heart of Darkness, and comments on the importance in Joseph Conrad’s novel of its own scream: “The horror, the Horror!” Marcher sees the void he has created out of the horror he wished to avoid, and James’ story isn’t a sign of the times, but a reflection of a personal pathology clearly James knew well - evident in his remark about life as ferocious and sinister.
Whatever fears Bonello shares with James, he takes the story away from the personal and into the generic, without quite insisting on the conventions of either the science fiction or the horror he draws from. It is as though he wants the disquiet of James, but is less concerned with the psychological intricacy, and this is evident by turning what, in James’s story, is an idiosyncratic feature of personality, into a conceit about the future of society. Marcher can’t confront his feelings; Gabrielle is expected to sacrifice hers in a world where AI can’t trust humans in touch with those feelings to work at anything but the most rudimentary of jobs. Gabrielle is at the end of the film as bereft as Marcher at the end of The Beast in the Jungle, but this is a consequence of where society has been going as opposed to where a timid man refused to go. It reconfigures the fear and also allows Bonello to venture into horror and sci-fi without relying on generic tropes. What would these tropes be that Bonello eschews, and does he reject them? Amongst such tropes would be horror devices like the damsel in distress alone in a house, and a person caught in a situation where they might drown. Sci-fi conventions include technology turning against us and a dystopian rendering of society. But the director wants to retain the rawness of fear without quite the compensating factor of its catharsis. In the section set in 1910, Gabrielle and Louis develop feelings for each other, though she is a married woman, and her husband the wealthy owner of a doll-making factory. Louis and Gabrielle are visiting the place and speaking about their feelings in a room away from the main factory environment, and when they reenter it, they become aware that the building has been flooded. A wire short-circuits, and the factory full of inflammable dolls goes up in flames, and there they are caught between the elements of fire and water, with the former of no use in protecting them from the latter. Moments earlier, when they were talking about their feelings towards each other in the backroom, Louis asks Gabrielle what scares her, and she replies she doesn’t know, and says “it is hard to express a feeling in words.” Moments later, they face the flood and the fire, and they both now have something to fear. In another film, this would be part of an extended sequence that would reveal their feelings through crisis: the horror or disaster movie scenario that allows a couple to show how much they care after going through an action-filled bonding situation. It doesn’t work out like that in The Beast. Gabrielle says the only way out will be through the basement - they only need to swim ten or fifteen metres. He goes first and says he will return if he can’t open the emergency exit. If he doesn’t come back after a couple of minutes, she must start to swim herself. Though Bonello is a little heavy on expositional dialogue before Louis jumps into the water, the director masters the suspense very well. Initially, we follow Louis, and then the film cuts back to Gabrielle as the fire quickly spreads. We have no idea how Louis is progressing, and Gabrielle jumps in as the film follows her underwater while she makes her way to the exit. The bar covering it proves impossible to dislodge,  and the film cuts to her feet as the drowned Louis enters the frame as her feet touch his head. A moment later, the film cuts to a doll, and then back to Gabrielle and Louis, now both dead, suspended as if in mid-air but floating in the midst of water.
It is a great sequence that requires the skills of an action filmmaker, ones that Bonello would not usually see himself as mastering. But he admitted: “For the first time in my life, I did storyboard, because it had to be very precise. This is not a $30 million film: it’s a $7.5 million film. We had two days with the fire, and two days underwater, so we had to be very precise.” (RogerEbert) Yet while he needed to match the effectiveness of a typical action sequence, he does so for quite different ends. The despair he arrives at allows him to find an image that haunts. Those two bodies suspended, objects as inanimate as the doll, register a horrible passivity that such sequences are usually there to counter. The characters generally escape death; they don’t usually become figures of uncanny inanimation. If there is a fear greater than death, it might be the blank emptiness of resembling what isn’t alive, even more than the terror of fearing what might come alive and hurt us — the usual role of dolls in film as varied as Dead of Night, Poltergeist and Child’s Play. Bonello uses the action sequence to arrive at the haunting rather than the other way round — a haunted house, for example, that characters have to find a way of escaping. He combines Jamesian incongruity with action filmmaking, and arrives at a feeling that transcends the genres he utilises.
Science fiction is usually more high concept than conceit. The former was a term commonly used in the 80s to describe a quick summary of a film that often contained a twist on reality. In The Terminator, for example, it is where a cyborg returns from the future to kill a woman who will give birth to the son who will fight the cyborgs. In Back to the Future, a son returns to the past after an experiment goes awry, and he has to make sure they fall in love so he can be born. In Big, Vice Versa and All of Me, they all offer body swaps as burlesque. The films then pursue the logic of the story within the concept, without especially attending to the conceit it has set in motion. But Bonello finally appears more interested in the conceit than the high concept: there is a theme he wishes to explore, rather than a story he wants to develop. As Bonello says, “For me it was a mix of many desires, the first being a desire to make a melodrama. That’s what led me to The Beast in the Jungle, which for me is one of the most heartbreaking, beautiful and tragic melodramatic novels.” He also reckons, "Another desire was to mix genres. One of the ideas in the novel is that love is fear. I wanted to go further into that fear by adding some other sections, such as a slasher tale in a more contemporary setting, and then a futuristic story, where you have this horrible dilemma of having to choose between being able to love and being able to work.” (BFI)
Such a mixture of genres and ideas can seem messy, and it makes sense that Tom Davison, reviewing the film, would view it as a difficult work that gets better with a rewatch. “It definitely has no easy answers and it’s not even clear what questions it is asking. It also has very little plot and is presented in an illusive, cryptic way, making itself deliberately difficult to get to grips with (exposition? Forget about it.).” (Medium) In our reading, the conceit would be the elaboration and combination of the thematic and the formal, in blending genres in such a way that an idea can be extracted. James doesn’t mix genres, even if Brooks can see a melodramatic dimension to the writer’s work that isn’t so much in the story, but expressed in the release of repressed feeling, as we find when Marcher throws himself down on the tombstone. But Bonello offers a period love story in 1910, a stalker film in 2014 where Louis is a raging incel, and an antiseptic dystopian science fiction in 2044, holding the three stories together through the previous lives of its two characters. It is a weak narrative link, all the better to explore a strong thematic one — and this is the central difference between a high concept and conceit. The high concept is a premise; the conceit is an idea — the premise catalyses the story, but it needn’t constantly return to it because the energy of it rests on the take-off possibilities the premise offers. Both The Terminator and Back to the Future don’t want the viewer thinking too hard about the concept itself, and the intricacies of quantum physics that might make time travel possible. The point is that after his professor throws him back in time, Marty McFly must help make his father a stronger character, make sure his parents get married so that he can be born, and that he finds a way back to the 1980s. This is goal-oriented cinema, wittily offered.
Bonello instead needs to find in the conceit an idea strong enough to hold together disparate genres, discovering it in love as an ontological condition. The director doesn’t seem interested in love conquering all as a romantic belief, but in love as a first principle, seeing it in contrast to reason. In the future, reason has become so paramount that humans have been demoted; their value must come out of their capacity to contain their emotions within the new ontology of AI. In a functional society based on efficiency, we can see why this would be so, but it isn’t so much that The Beast praises the irrational and the romantic. It is more the loss of a regulating system that shuttles between instinct and reason. Instinct isn't the enemy of reason, but its regulatory principle. The enemy of reason in this sense would be impulse, where the affect would be unregulated and based on the most instantaneous of feelings. Society has long questioned how to control those impulses, and some have fretted over whether the free impulse is the price that needs to be paid or accepted for individual freedoms. In different ways, this question was addressed by Freud, Foucault, BF Skinner and Anthony Burgess, with Freud’s hopeful, Foucault’s oppressive, Skinner’s behavioural, and Burgess’s speculative. That might be a hasty summary, but the alternative would be a lengthy exploration, and all we want to offer is a defence of instinct that we believe is central to Bonello ending the film on love.
In different ways, Foucault and Burgess explored disciplinary societies and how they function, whether historically in Foucault's case, in Discipline and Punish, or fictionally, in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. In Skinner’s work, he examines the various ways people are taught to be good or to accept the limitations of that goodness, from permissiveness to Socratic maieutics and Rousseau’s environmental specificity. But Skinner finally reckons that all are a little too close to internal assumptions rather than observable factors. What needs to be abolished is “…autonomous man — the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity.” (Beyond Freedom and Dignity) Freud was, of course, interested in autonomous man, and when speaking of sexuality, noted that people could repress their sexual desires without becoming physically ill: one may become frustrated, but that is different from becoming hungry or thirsty.  Freud also adds that “the sexual instinctual impulses in particular are extraordinarily plastic, if I may so express it. One of them takes place of another, one of which can take over another’s intensity.” (Introductory Lectures) He goes on to say that this desire can be so transformed that it might not take sexual form at all — “we call this process ‘sublimation’ in, accordance with the general aim estimate that places social aims higher than sexual ones, which is at bottom self-interested.” The inner man that Skinner rejects makes, in Freud, choices which can allow for the plasticity of desire or its sublimation.
An intimate psychological tale will explore this question through the perspective of character, and a science fiction film through the societal demand. In James’s story, Marcher is repressed as he is free to make various choices, but his personal make-up doesn’t allow him to do so until it is too late. In Bonello’s film, the choice is still there to be made, but it wouldn’t be fair to call Gabrielle a neurotic - she has been given what she sees as a difficult choice because of the society that has formed around her. If she takes a job that allows her greater individuality, she will at the same time lose an aspect of her self. She can hold onto the complexity of her memories and past selves, but will find no reward in the work she does. Marcher is the typically wealthy Jamesian man who has time on his hands and turns over endless thoughts in his mind; Bonello’s Gabrielle simply worries over the difficult choice she faces, and the consequences of the treatment. Yet when she does finally go through with it, the treatment fails, as though her past lives are too strong and her affects too determined. If this is so, then the tragedy that arises is quite distinct from James’s conclusion. In ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, Marcher loses a woman who we can assume was ready to love him, as he could have loved her if he weren’t so fearful. In The Beast, Gabrielle takes a treatment that fails, but that works for Louis, proposing perhaps that his feelings and the integrity of his personality are much weaker than hers. The sorrow Marcher offers at the end is one of enormous regret; the scream Gabrielle lets out conveys immense solitude. They might both arrive at a devastating loneliness, but for quite different reasons.
   Rather than seeing Skinner and Freud, Foucault and Burgess offering different interpretations of reality, perhaps better to see them as offering different genres towards understanding reality. In this sense, if a film wants to emphasise the forces upon us as a power structure, Foucault is of immense use; if the film wishes to offer a benign behaviourism where people are coerced into acting better, then Skinner has a role. If cinema wishes to play up the brutality of pushing people into designated actions, as the state becomes as aggressive as the individual, then Burgess has something to tell us, and Freud remains important in comprehending the vagaries of complex selves. If Bonello’s film has an aspect of Skinner, it also resists its application, with Louis and many others benefiting from the treatment as it works on more than 99 per cent of those partaking, but Gabrielle is one of the few for whom it doesn’t. By the film’s conclusion, Gabrielle will know why she has felt so lost as she discovers, through the treatment, memories of past lives, but while she has undergone a psychoanalytic transformation in undergoing it, though with the outcome leaving her unchanged, Louis has undergone the same treatment and come out the other end. Gabrielle has managed to get in touch with memories, while Louis has had his cleaned, creating a polished individual who has access to his past as Gabrielle does, but will not be able to share the same depth of affect. He will be working for the Ministry of Justice, and she will continue in a simpler job. Yet she will possess the more complex emotions. It is as if one partner has been in psychoanalysis and the other in CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), in a psychotherapeutic version of an impossible love story. It might seem a remarkably trivial claim we are making, but if two people who love each other find themselves accepting very different forms of therapy, can they claim to be interested in the same affective depth?
CBT is a pragmatic approach to healthier selfhood, one that draws on Skinner as “Behaviourists such as BF Skinner had already shown that human behaviour could be predictably manipulated, much like that of pigeons or rats, by means of punishment and reward.” CBT also, Oliver Burkeman notes, ”embodies a very specific view of painful emotions: that they’re primarily something to be eliminated, or failing that, made tolerable. A condition such as depression, then, is a bit like a cancerous tumour: sure, it might be useful to figure out where it came from – but it’s far more important to get rid of it.” (Guardian) Gabrielle might have wished to get rid of her feelings too, but failed, and is left with the complexity of psychoanalysis, while Louis has become behaviourally sorted and ready to do a well-paid, rewarding job. While we can view Gabrielle’s scream at the film’s end as a tragic recognition, we might also read it as a very human one. The individual who has few strong feelings will likely react as Seydoux does at the beginning of the film when facing a very tangible fear. But they might not react as Gabrielle does on realising that the love of her life, and her lives before, has in 2044, become a ghost of his former self affectively, all the while Gabrielle remains an emotionally embodied individual who becomes a psychoanalytically complex scream queen. This closing scene takes place in a nightclub that might have been a leftover David Lynch set. The curtains are bright red, and the mise en scene is a mixture chiefly of red and blue. There is even Roy Orbison on the soundtrack, which inevitably brings to mind ‘In Dreams’ from Blue Velvet. But most importantly, there is that scream, with Bonello coinciding with Lynch’s awareness that a scream is both an external stimulus and an internal recognition. Gabrielle may have drowned in the 1910 episode (and was murdered in the 2014 one), but now the scream has nothing more terrifying than a bland individual telling her how happy he is to see her, as she is horrified by the profound emotional gap between them. What, Bonello asks, is more terrifying than that?

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Beast

The Nature of the Scream

 
Henry James’ ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ is an obscure story of possibility, of the central character believing that “something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little whether the crouching beast was destined to slay him or to be slain.” Bertrand Bonello’s film, The Beast, is an adaptation that wonders what possibility happens to be, dramatising it just as James intellectualised it. If the future is unknown, then, as James says, whether it leaves us slain or doing the slaying, whether it gives us a sense of dread or a sense of hope, it won’t be dependent on the future, but on our perspective upon it. Of course, some people are optimistic or pessimistic based on probability. The person who goes to bed at night, aware that the bailiffs may call the next morning, hits the pillow with more dread than the one who is expecting a knock on the door from the postman with various birthday gifts. But even here, the person anticipating the bailiffs may insist to themselves that the bailiff will be too busy to pay them a visit the next day, and, by the time they do, the person will have been able to pay off their debts. Meanwhile, the person awaiting birthday gifts may dread the disappointment of a loved one forgetting such an important day in their life.
Bonello doesn’t just fret with the characters over their futures — he partly sets his film there, with the movie taking place in 1910 (James’ story was published in 1903), 2014, and 2044, as if he wanted to capture an aspect of fear as realisation — a central feature in science fiction and partly why it often segues into horror. When Bonello speaks of Cronenberg, Romero and Carpenter, he says “they themselves believed the fear they were bringing to the screen, and they worked with genre because that allowed them to articulate their anxieties about the world—and often those concerns are political.” (Reverse Shot) By adopting horror and science fiction, they could offer an angle that incorporates personal terror within a broader hope, or vice versa. In other words, the character could be in a terrible predicament but manage to escape it, even if society looks doomed, as at the end of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Equally, an environment can seem quite benign even if characters are threatened within it — as Halloween illustrates. The Beast, by mixing different genres, offers fear blended with hope, yet in a far more unusual and epistemologically unsettling way than in a clearly generic horror or science fiction film.
The central difference between the person who suspects someone will forget their birthday and the person who reckons the bailiffs won’t turn up the next morning is disposition. But what they both share are emotions that can play havoc with feelings based on probability. They both react unpredictably. It is this problem with emotions in humans that The Beast addresses and to which it gives dramatic form. In 2044, the environment has been saved by AI, while human beings have been semi-sacrificed: most humans are only allowed to do simple jobs, as they can’t be trusted with more sophisticated ones. They are unable to do them without feeling, and this will get in the way of reason. Central character Gabrielle is frustrated doing menial tasks, but can only escape the work if she foregoes her emotions: “Today, there are no biased decisions made by people who are annoyed or depressed”, the AI system informs her. All she has to do is have her DNA cleaned of past lives and experiences, and she can find herself promoted to higher-end employment. Gabrielle is undeniably scared, but the AI insists that she will still be able to feel things; only with a greater serenity, which sounds an awful lot like a drug you can never fail to continue taking.
Such a trade-off is a Faustian pact, as  modest ambition, and the relatively easy life commonly to be found in science fiction works from Brave New World, where Soma tranquillizes the populace, to The Stepford Wives, where the husbands have the most compliant of spouses because they have all been turned into robots. In The Beast, as Gabrielle starts the purification process and assesses her past life in 1910 Paris, and then to another in 2014 Los Angeles, she meets at the nightclub Louis (an incarnation of the figures from the previous lives), and they both share their doubts about the purification. This plays like a variation of love at first sight as deja vu, with both characters unaware of their past existences in each other’s company, while the viewer becomes increasingly aware they have shared histories and these will be eradicated by the process. If in Dawn of the Dead, we know that the characters are in a malign environment, one they must do their best to navigate, and in Halloween, the characters are in a benign one that contains simply a malevolent presence, in The Beast, Gabrielle doesn’t quite know the world she is in, nor what she should trust in it. In the opening scene, Lea Seydoux is in a green-screen room as a director (Bonello’s voice) explains the layout as it would be perceived by viewers. At the end of the sequence, she has to let out a very loud scream. The scene is a comment on the artificiality practised in many a contemporary work, but also captures an aspect of the predicament that The Beast generally offers. What is this thing that generates fear, and should Gabrielle accept the reality of mid-21st-century life, and assume that her past is a drag on her future, or should she see that whatever meaning her existence has is closely associated with a person capable of feeling depressed and annoyed?
  In James’ story, the central character is John Marcher, and the setting the Edwardian era, but it stays within the one time frame as the years pass by. The story shows a man who is so determined to escape a fear he cannot comprehend that he doesn’t wish to engage anyone in this potential and terrible catastrophe. If he doesn’t know if the beast in the jungle will slay him or he will be slain, best to venture alone: “the definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature, and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger hunt.” By the conclusion, the fear was fear itself, and Marcher loses the woman he had loved as he discovers that, in many ways, the very thing he found so fearful was the future that would become his past: “something — and this reached him with a pang —that he, John Marcher hadn’t; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher’s end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant…”
Speaking of the story, Bonello has said: “What’s great about the idea of premonition, of a sign that precedes something, is that you don’t know what the beast is. You don’t see it, and it’s not an actual beast, so you can put a lot of fears into the word ‘beast’, just as the characters can put a lot of fears into the word ‘catastrophe’. Something is going to happen.” (RogerEbert) The main difference is the nature of each version’s tragic irony. In the story, it rests on a man who fears what turned out to be his own future as the woman dies and he is bereft, aware of how much he loved a woman and how he had lost this love because he was too fearful to commit to it. In Bonello’s film, the tragic irony is contained within the science-fiction concept. Gabrielle’s procedure fails while Louis’s succeeds, so at the moment she realises this is the man from her past lives, she sees that the treatment has worked for him. They will not be able to feel the same things together, and she lets out the very scream we heard at the beginning of the film in the green-screen room.
Bonello moves from the nuance of James to the bluntness of the horror movie, with Seydoux becoming nothing if not a scream queen, though he turns the former shriek that represents a categorical fear, even if it isn’t shown, to a psychic scream that is manifest. In other words, while at the beginning of the film the director explains in detail what Seydoux will be reacting to, even if she cannot see it as a beast encroaches, at the end of the film, she will see very much in front of her a man she knows she cannot now reach, as his feelings have become muted, while her own are pronounced. The screams have very different functions, while the typical horror scream has a clear one. Bonello plays with the scream’s assumptions in two ways. In the first, by absencing the digitised manifestation of the monster, and in the second by making the scream a product of Gabrielle’s horror in the face of emotional asymmetry. These are very distinct screams, and while we might think that Bonello is absorbing melodrama into a writer who is well-known for his discretion, we might also think of Peter Brooks’ inclusion of James’ work in The Melodramatic Imagination, and also how rare it is that a scream carries such discrete meanings.  Bonello is invoking, perhaps just a little, the complexity of David Lynch’s screams, from Laura Dern’s reaction to news on the radio in Wild at Heart, to Sheryl Lee’s scream in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the silent scream outside the diner in Mulholland Drive, to the reaction of the nurse in The Elephant Man first encountering the titular character’s presence. It makes sense Bonello would be an admirer of the American director, saying “…[what] inspires me in David Lynch is that he allows himself everything. He inspires me in his freedom,” even if he also says when asked if he consciously took from Twin Peaks, “Conscious? Not really.” (HeyUGuys) But given no director has offered a greater range in the scream’s possibilities, it would be unlikely that Lynch’s approach to the scream would have no association at all, but one way of understanding The Beast is to see two very different sensibilities at play on the material: Lynch’s and James’s.
      When Brooks quotes James in The Melodramatic Imagination, it could come from the mouth of Bonello. “I have the imagination of Disaster…and see life as ferocious and sinister.” Bonello reckons, “what’s good about science fiction is that you’re creating a world, inventing a world, and you’re talking about your fear of the present — of today. I’m not alone in this of course, but my fear of today is very huge.” (In Review) Brooks, speaking about the ending of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, notes the absence of event met by the ‘lurid’ nature of its conclusion as Marcher flings himself face down on May Bartram’s grave. Brooks speaks of the moral occult and, while seeing it in Gothic literature, also sees it in James’ work. Brooks observes it in the “realm of inner imperatives and demons, and the Gothic novel dramatises again and again the importance of bringing this occult into man’s waking, social existence, of saying its meaning and acting out its force.” (The Melodramatic Imagination) In the story, we see “Marcher’s void and menace are imaged as ‘Beast in the Jungle’ of course makes the relation of the moral occult to his unconscious compelling — a return of the repressed — the result is the melodrama of hysteria and hallucination.”  Brooks compares the work to, among others, Heart of Darkness, and comments on the importance in Joseph Conrad’s novel of its own scream: “The horror, the Horror!” Marcher sees the void he has created out of the horror he wished to avoid, and James’ story isn’t a sign of the times, but a reflection of a personal pathology clearly James knew well - evident in his remark about life as ferocious and sinister.
Whatever fears Bonello shares with James, he takes the story away from the personal and into the generic, without quite insisting on the conventions of either the science fiction or the horror he draws from. It is as though he wants the disquiet of James, but is less concerned with the psychological intricacy, and this is evident by turning what, in James’s story, is an idiosyncratic feature of personality, into a conceit about the future of society. Marcher can’t confront his feelings; Gabrielle is expected to sacrifice hers in a world where AI can’t trust humans in touch with those feelings to work at anything but the most rudimentary of jobs. Gabrielle is at the end of the film as bereft as Marcher at the end of The Beast in the Jungle, but this is a consequence of where society has been going as opposed to where a timid man refused to go. It reconfigures the fear and also allows Bonello to venture into horror and sci-fi without relying on generic tropes. What would these tropes be that Bonello eschews, and does he reject them? Amongst such tropes would be horror devices like the damsel in distress alone in a house, and a person caught in a situation where they might drown. Sci-fi conventions include technology turning against us and a dystopian rendering of society. But the director wants to retain the rawness of fear without quite the compensating factor of its catharsis. In the section set in 1910, Gabrielle and Louis develop feelings for each other, though she is a married woman, and her husband the wealthy owner of a doll-making factory. Louis and Gabrielle are visiting the place and speaking about their feelings in a room away from the main factory environment, and when they reenter it, they become aware that the building has been flooded. A wire short-circuits, and the factory full of inflammable dolls goes up in flames, and there they are caught between the elements of fire and water, with the former of no use in protecting them from the latter. Moments earlier, when they were talking about their feelings towards each other in the backroom, Louis asks Gabrielle what scares her, and she replies she doesn’t know, and says “it is hard to express a feeling in words.” Moments later, they face the flood and the fire, and they both now have something to fear. In another film, this would be part of an extended sequence that would reveal their feelings through crisis: the horror or disaster movie scenario that allows a couple to show how much they care after going through an action-filled bonding situation. It doesn’t work out like that in The Beast. Gabrielle says the only way out will be through the basement - they only need to swim ten or fifteen metres. He goes first and says he will return if he can’t open the emergency exit. If he doesn’t come back after a couple of minutes, she must start to swim herself. Though Bonello is a little heavy on expositional dialogue before Louis jumps into the water, the director masters the suspense very well. Initially, we follow Louis, and then the film cuts back to Gabrielle as the fire quickly spreads. We have no idea how Louis is progressing, and Gabrielle jumps in as the film follows her underwater while she makes her way to the exit. The bar covering it proves impossible to dislodge,  and the film cuts to her feet as the drowned Louis enters the frame as her feet touch his head. A moment later, the film cuts to a doll, and then back to Gabrielle and Louis, now both dead, suspended as if in mid-air but floating in the midst of water.
It is a great sequence that requires the skills of an action filmmaker, ones that Bonello would not usually see himself as mastering. But he admitted: “For the first time in my life, I did storyboard, because it had to be very precise. This is not a $30 million film: it’s a $7.5 million film. We had two days with the fire, and two days underwater, so we had to be very precise.” (RogerEbert) Yet while he needed to match the effectiveness of a typical action sequence, he does so for quite different ends. The despair he arrives at allows him to find an image that haunts. Those two bodies suspended, objects as inanimate as the doll, register a horrible passivity that such sequences are usually there to counter. The characters generally escape death; they don’t usually become figures of uncanny inanimation. If there is a fear greater than death, it might be the blank emptiness of resembling what isn’t alive, even more than the terror of fearing what might come alive and hurt us — the usual role of dolls in film as varied as Dead of Night, Poltergeist and Child’s Play. Bonello uses the action sequence to arrive at the haunting rather than the other way round — a haunted house, for example, that characters have to find a way of escaping. He combines Jamesian incongruity with action filmmaking, and arrives at a feeling that transcends the genres he utilises.
Science fiction is usually more high concept than conceit. The former was a term commonly used in the 80s to describe a quick summary of a film that often contained a twist on reality. In The Terminator, for example, it is where a cyborg returns from the future to kill a woman who will give birth to the son who will fight the cyborgs. In Back to the Future, a son returns to the past after an experiment goes awry, and he has to make sure they fall in love so he can be born. In Big, Vice Versa and All of Me, they all offer body swaps as burlesque. The films then pursue the logic of the story within the concept, without especially attending to the conceit it has set in motion. But Bonello finally appears more interested in the conceit than the high concept: there is a theme he wishes to explore, rather than a story he wants to develop. As Bonello says, “For me it was a mix of many desires, the first being a desire to make a melodrama. That’s what led me to The Beast in the Jungle, which for me is one of the most heartbreaking, beautiful and tragic melodramatic novels.” He also reckons, "Another desire was to mix genres. One of the ideas in the novel is that love is fear. I wanted to go further into that fear by adding some other sections, such as a slasher tale in a more contemporary setting, and then a futuristic story, where you have this horrible dilemma of having to choose between being able to love and being able to work.” (BFI)
Such a mixture of genres and ideas can seem messy, and it makes sense that Tom Davison, reviewing the film, would view it as a difficult work that gets better with a rewatch. “It definitely has no easy answers and it’s not even clear what questions it is asking. It also has very little plot and is presented in an illusive, cryptic way, making itself deliberately difficult to get to grips with (exposition? Forget about it.).” (Medium) In our reading, the conceit would be the elaboration and combination of the thematic and the formal, in blending genres in such a way that an idea can be extracted. James doesn’t mix genres, even if Brooks can see a melodramatic dimension to the writer’s work that isn’t so much in the story, but expressed in the release of repressed feeling, as we find when Marcher throws himself down on the tombstone. But Bonello offers a period love story in 1910, a stalker film in 2014 where Louis is a raging incel, and an antiseptic dystopian science fiction in 2044, holding the three stories together through the previous lives of its two characters. It is a weak narrative link, all the better to explore a strong thematic one — and this is the central difference between a high concept and conceit. The high concept is a premise; the conceit is an idea — the premise catalyses the story, but it needn’t constantly return to it because the energy of it rests on the take-off possibilities the premise offers. Both The Terminator and Back to the Future don’t want the viewer thinking too hard about the concept itself, and the intricacies of quantum physics that might make time travel possible. The point is that after his professor throws him back in time, Marty McFly must help make his father a stronger character, make sure his parents get married so that he can be born, and that he finds a way back to the 1980s. This is goal-oriented cinema, wittily offered.
Bonello instead needs to find in the conceit an idea strong enough to hold together disparate genres, discovering it in love as an ontological condition. The director doesn’t seem interested in love conquering all as a romantic belief, but in love as a first principle, seeing it in contrast to reason. In the future, reason has become so paramount that humans have been demoted; their value must come out of their capacity to contain their emotions within the new ontology of AI. In a functional society based on efficiency, we can see why this would be so, but it isn’t so much that The Beast praises the irrational and the romantic. It is more the loss of a regulating system that shuttles between instinct and reason. Instinct isn't the enemy of reason, but its regulatory principle. The enemy of reason in this sense would be impulse, where the affect would be unregulated and based on the most instantaneous of feelings. Society has long questioned how to control those impulses, and some have fretted over whether the free impulse is the price that needs to be paid or accepted for individual freedoms. In different ways, this question was addressed by Freud, Foucault, BF Skinner and Anthony Burgess, with Freud’s hopeful, Foucault’s oppressive, Skinner’s behavioural, and Burgess’s speculative. That might be a hasty summary, but the alternative would be a lengthy exploration, and all we want to offer is a defence of instinct that we believe is central to Bonello ending the film on love.
In different ways, Foucault and Burgess explored disciplinary societies and how they function, whether historically in Foucault's case, in Discipline and Punish, or fictionally, in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. In Skinner’s work, he examines the various ways people are taught to be good or to accept the limitations of that goodness, from permissiveness to Socratic maieutics and Rousseau’s environmental specificity. But Skinner finally reckons that all are a little too close to internal assumptions rather than observable factors. What needs to be abolished is “…autonomous man — the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity.” (Beyond Freedom and Dignity) Freud was, of course, interested in autonomous man, and when speaking of sexuality, noted that people could repress their sexual desires without becoming physically ill: one may become frustrated, but that is different from becoming hungry or thirsty.  Freud also adds that “the sexual instinctual impulses in particular are extraordinarily plastic, if I may so express it. One of them takes place of another, one of which can take over another’s intensity.” (Introductory Lectures) He goes on to say that this desire can be so transformed that it might not take sexual form at all — “we call this process ‘sublimation’ in, accordance with the general aim estimate that places social aims higher than sexual ones, which is at bottom self-interested.” The inner man that Skinner rejects makes, in Freud, choices which can allow for the plasticity of desire or its sublimation.
An intimate psychological tale will explore this question through the perspective of character, and a science fiction film through the societal demand. In James’s story, Marcher is repressed as he is free to make various choices, but his personal make-up doesn’t allow him to do so until it is too late. In Bonello’s film, the choice is still there to be made, but it wouldn’t be fair to call Gabrielle a neurotic - she has been given what she sees as a difficult choice because of the society that has formed around her. If she takes a job that allows her greater individuality, she will at the same time lose an aspect of her self. She can hold onto the complexity of her memories and past selves, but will find no reward in the work she does. Marcher is the typically wealthy Jamesian man who has time on his hands and turns over endless thoughts in his mind; Bonello’s Gabrielle simply worries over the difficult choice she faces, and the consequences of the treatment. Yet when she does finally go through with it, the treatment fails, as though her past lives are too strong and her affects too determined. If this is so, then the tragedy that arises is quite distinct from James’s conclusion. In ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, Marcher loses a woman who we can assume was ready to love him, as he could have loved her if he weren’t so fearful. In The Beast, Gabrielle takes a treatment that fails, but that works for Louis, proposing perhaps that his feelings and the integrity of his personality are much weaker than hers. The sorrow Marcher offers at the end is one of enormous regret; the scream Gabrielle lets out conveys immense solitude. They might both arrive at a devastating loneliness, but for quite different reasons.
   Rather than seeing Skinner and Freud, Foucault and Burgess offering different interpretations of reality, perhaps better to see them as offering different genres towards understanding reality. In this sense, if a film wants to emphasise the forces upon us as a power structure, Foucault is of immense use; if the film wishes to offer a benign behaviourism where people are coerced into acting better, then Skinner has a role. If cinema wishes to play up the brutality of pushing people into designated actions, as the state becomes as aggressive as the individual, then Burgess has something to tell us, and Freud remains important in comprehending the vagaries of complex selves. If Bonello’s film has an aspect of Skinner, it also resists its application, with Louis and many others benefiting from the treatment as it works on more than 99 per cent of those partaking, but Gabrielle is one of the few for whom it doesn’t. By the film’s conclusion, Gabrielle will know why she has felt so lost as she discovers, through the treatment, memories of past lives, but while she has undergone a psychoanalytic transformation in undergoing it, though with the outcome leaving her unchanged, Louis has undergone the same treatment and come out the other end. Gabrielle has managed to get in touch with memories, while Louis has had his cleaned, creating a polished individual who has access to his past as Gabrielle does, but will not be able to share the same depth of affect. He will be working for the Ministry of Justice, and she will continue in a simpler job. Yet she will possess the more complex emotions. It is as if one partner has been in psychoanalysis and the other in CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), in a psychotherapeutic version of an impossible love story. It might seem a remarkably trivial claim we are making, but if two people who love each other find themselves accepting very different forms of therapy, can they claim to be interested in the same affective depth?
CBT is a pragmatic approach to healthier selfhood, one that draws on Skinner as “Behaviourists such as BF Skinner had already shown that human behaviour could be predictably manipulated, much like that of pigeons or rats, by means of punishment and reward.” CBT also, Oliver Burkeman notes, ”embodies a very specific view of painful emotions: that they’re primarily something to be eliminated, or failing that, made tolerable. A condition such as depression, then, is a bit like a cancerous tumour: sure, it might be useful to figure out where it came from – but it’s far more important to get rid of it.” (Guardian) Gabrielle might have wished to get rid of her feelings too, but failed, and is left with the complexity of psychoanalysis, while Louis has become behaviourally sorted and ready to do a well-paid, rewarding job. While we can view Gabrielle’s scream at the film’s end as a tragic recognition, we might also read it as a very human one. The individual who has few strong feelings will likely react as Seydoux does at the beginning of the film when facing a very tangible fear. But they might not react as Gabrielle does on realising that the love of her life, and her lives before, has in 2044, become a ghost of his former self affectively, all the while Gabrielle remains an emotionally embodied individual who becomes a psychoanalytically complex scream queen. This closing scene takes place in a nightclub that might have been a leftover David Lynch set. The curtains are bright red, and the mise en scene is a mixture chiefly of red and blue. There is even Roy Orbison on the soundtrack, which inevitably brings to mind ‘In Dreams’ from Blue Velvet. But most importantly, there is that scream, with Bonello coinciding with Lynch’s awareness that a scream is both an external stimulus and an internal recognition. Gabrielle may have drowned in the 1910 episode (and was murdered in the 2014 one), but now the scream has nothing more terrifying than a bland individual telling her how happy he is to see her, as she is horrified by the profound emotional gap between them. What, Bonello asks, is more terrifying than that?

© Tony McKibbin