What is the baseline for a good creature feature? Not every film can be Jaws or Tremors, and yet they all share some basic scenes or storytelling beats. There are obligatory moments where we understand the main characters through broadly defined personalities, for example, and the creature must remain in shadow before a climatic showdown. In terms of those storytelling beats, the new thriller Beast sometimes goes through the unspoken checklist dutifully. Why, then, does it build toward something that is so unsatisfying? By focusing its attention on formal flourishes and undercooked family dynamics, director Baltasar Kormákur turns his attention away from the fundamentals.
At first, the premise and economical storytelling is admirable. Idris Elba plays Nate, an American doctor who travels to South Africa to patch things with his daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries). The girls are reeling from the death of their mother, Nate’s ex, who succumbed to cancer, and since she grew up in South Africa, the trip is an opportunity for the family to reconnect with her roots. Screenwriter Ryan Engle spends just enough time with the character so we understand the tension between them, then sets them on a daytrip through a game reserve. It all goes well until Martin stumbles upon a village where all the humans are viciously slaughtered. He realizes that a disgruntled lion is the culprit, and its path of vengeance is nowhere near complete.
Engle’s script considers the lion’s motivation in detail, if only because it acts against its nature throughout the film. A prologue tells us that poachers recently slaughtered the lion’s pride, leaving it to the conclusion that humans are the real enemy, regardless of culpability. This is bad news for the poachers, who appear in Beast primarily as meat sacks, and Nate’s family, who are closer to innocent bystanders. Motivation notwithstanding, Beast suffers because this lion is not particularly frightening and lacks personality, for lack of a better word. By appearing at the most dramatic moment, it is more of a plot convenience than a formidable threat. More importantly, the film is oddly squeamish about gore and viscera, even during scenes where Nate performs triage on his own family.
Instead of zeroing on the terror of his characters, Kormákur shoots long takes where Nate and the others navigate through complex scenery, such a village or an abandoned church. These shots are not as technically complicated as they look, as there are invisible CGI cuts, and they do not have the intended effect of adding suspense to a primal man-against-nature story. In fact, they have the opposite effect because the camera placement frequently deemphasizes the lion’s attacks. All the actors struggle to add a human dimension, and while they are convincing within their familiar archetypes, there is an oddly dispassionate element to their desperation.
Tone and implacable logic are the most reliable ways to make a memorable creature feature. In the “man vs. wolves” film The Grey, for example, the film opts for a grimly existential approach to the material until it becomes an allegorical tale of resilience and survival. In the “man vs. gators” film Crawl, it adds a hurricane into the mix, making the creatures more dangerous and giving the characters unique ways to vanquish them. Those kinds of tweaks are not in Beast, which prefers a traditional antagonist and surrounding setting. Sure, the African bush is pretty to look at, but it adds little atmosphere. If anything, the major flourish in the film is the underlying family drama, which does not succeed because even if Nate and the girls were complete strangers, we would care about their fate in the same exact way.
Beast is a modest success, insofar that it delivers exactly what you might expect, including a self-aware, borderline hilarious scene where Elba’s character has no choice but to punch the lion in the face. Its other qualities are an attempt to elevate the genre, or maybe give the premise more universal appeal, when Beast could have succeeded by delving headlong into nastier genre thrills. Who would care about irreconciled daughters when there are close-ups of a person’s flesh hanging in a lion’s gaping maw?
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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