Michael Pearce’s Beast (it is Pearce’s debut, and he wrote it) feels refreshingly unpredictable without feeling unearned.
Starts with a carefully arranged mini-montage of shrines, there has been a series of murders in this small island community
Beast features strong early performances from 2020 standouts—Jessie Buckley leads (she’d go on to be in I’m Thinking of Ending Things) and supporting her is the charming Johnny Flynn (from 2020’s Emma). Geraldine James plays Buckley’s overbearing, strict, bitch of a mother (acting as prison warden in this lovely designed golden, sterile house) and Olwen Fouéré is superb in her one intense scene with Buckley
Lovely rock climbing landscape by the sea shot and sequence
Flynn has such quiet confidence and Buckley has this great twitchy nervousness. She’s our central character and we see her unraveling (and becoming increasingly unreliable as our narrative vehicle) through a few surrealism sequences. The scene where she screams at those outside of the church is magnificent.
[…] Beast – Pearce […]