The Beast
Janus Film | Release Date: April 5, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
80
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 35 Critic Reviews
Positive:
29
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
EmpireSteph GreenMay 28, 2024
By putting technology on trial as the chief parasite causing modern malaise, but fusing it with a melodrama about love, Bonello has created a wholly original work that pulses with prescience. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubMatthew JacksonMay 1, 2024
The Beast is a monster of a movie, one that will sink its claws into you, then ask you to contemplate the wounds it leaves. It’s not an easy watch, but it is a deeply rewarding one that you’ll be thinking about for days. Read full review
100
The New York TimesBeatrice LoayzaApr 4, 2024
This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyApr 3, 2024
Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far. Read full review
100
Slant MagazineKeith UhlichSep 12, 2023
Bertrand Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 5, 2023
The Beast may not add up to a cogent or thoroughgoing critique of all the ideas it invokes, but it’s such a luxurious cinematic experience; it’s created with such elan and attack, and the musical score amplifies its throb of fear. Read full review
92
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzApr 18, 2024
Classical and ultramodern – Bonello closes things off with a QR code, of all things – The Beast is an experience both bold and rich. Read full review
91
ColliderChase HutchinsonSep 14, 2023
Across each twist in time and place that can rush together without warning, the grounding force to it all is Seydoux. Read full review
91
IndieWireDavid EhrlichSep 5, 2023
The film’s true power stems from and speaks to our specifically present condition as people beset on all sides by the fears of our own imagination. By the trauma of something that already happened, or the terror of something that might. Read full review
91
The Film StageDavid KatzSep 5, 2023
For what a discomforting and despairing experience much of The Beast is, when I’ve thought back to it, its moments of real, uncomplicated cinematic pleasure, its verve and sense of joyousness, are what mark my memories. It’s romantic, without a capital-R. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesApr 4, 2024
The Beast has sequences of such insidiously effective suspense and arresting, even moving strangeness that the film could only have come from exactly those to whom it pays singular tribute: thinking, feeling humans. Read full review
90
PolygonSiddhant AdlakhaOct 18, 2023
Rather than copying the core premise of the short story, Bonello’s French- and English-language adaptation uses James’ dense, descriptive prose to weave detailed textures and sensations in each of his timelines. Read full review
88
ABC NewsPeter TraversApr 5, 2024
Bertrand Bonello’s exhilarating cinematic challenge stars a never-better Lea Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers across space and time who fight to embrace the beast of their dangerous emotions while artificial intelligence threatens to eradicate it. Read full review
83
Original-CinKaren GordonApr 18, 2024
Bonnello wants us to take our time. He’s given it a certain pace that weaves you in if you’re willing to go with it. And things to contemplate if you do. Read full review
83
The PlaylistRafaela Sales RossSep 5, 2023
Although it is true that The Beast would greatly benefit from a gentle trimming in its first hour, it is easy to forgive the indulgence when the result is such a remarkable commentary on the looming threats of artificial intelligence and the dangers of glorified emotional numbness. Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyJun 13, 2024
The future presented in The Beast, Bertrand Bonello’s mesmeric blend of sci-fi, horror and romance, feels frighteningly plausible. Read full review
80
Little White LiesHannah StrongMay 29, 2024
Although the first 40 minutes in the buttoned-up period setting do drag a little, once The Beast finds its groove, its imaginative and melodramatic spirit are hard to resist. It’s a big swing for the fences from a singular French filmmaker, and one that absolutely pays off. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreApr 6, 2024
It overflows with intriguing ideas, even if they aren’t all fully explored. Read full review
80
Screen RantGraeme GuttmannApr 5, 2024
Bonello posits that, even in fear, feeling is more important than forgetting, and every little death is a door to another future. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesTim GriersonApr 4, 2024
The film’s Lynchian surrealism and time-jumping adventurousness, although occasionally hobbled by narrative digressions, are lifted up by the two leads. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 8, 2023
On a first viewing, I wasn’t quite convinced by some of the glitchy japes Bonello deploys here and there . . . But perhaps he wants us to think of the film itself like its torn heroine: a strange machine whose ghost refuses to give up. Read full review
80
Screen DailyJonathan RomneySep 5, 2023
Each of the film’s three strands has its own dramatic flaws and virtues. But what is most intriguing is the way that the stories are braided, both in editor Anita Roth’s intercutting and in the establishing of visual parallels. Read full review
77
The Daily BeastNick SchagerOct 9, 2023
While its assortment of recurring images, conversations, scenes, and dynamics intermittently borders on the exhausting, it plays as an intriguing meditation on desire, dreams, and the things that make us who we are—and without which we’re lost. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsApr 15, 2024
Its devotion to the untamed territory of the human heart, its artfully discombobulating time and locale shifts, the shifting personae handled with marvelous fluidity by Seydoux; it takes you somewhere, and more than one somewhere. Read full review
75
Film ThreatSimone CromerSep 14, 2023
The Beast is a bold, creative, and heady dystopian film that clocks in way too long at 145 minutes. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerSep 5, 2023
The film maintains a certain level of suspense as it leaps between various epochs, often without warning. But, like many of Bonello’s movies, it lacks forward momentum and a sharp edit, lumbering along as it reaches into a grab bag of thematic and aesthetic concepts. Read full review
67
Paste MagazineJesse HassengerOct 10, 2023
Despite Seydoux’s uniquely magnetic ennui – could any other contemporary actress imbue a beautifully bored model with such empathy? — and MacKay’s gameness to bring a little nuance to a real creep in the 2014 section, The Beast has an undercurrent of restlessness, maybe even listlessness. Read full review
63
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanApr 11, 2024
The film “The Beast” is a Russian nesting doll of genres: a belle epoque romance set inside a contemporary serial-killer thriller set inside a dystopian sci-fi drama. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyApr 8, 2024
The Beast is an unusual film: challenging, ambitious, and inward. Even when inscrutable, as it often is, it holds the attention, though less so the longer it lasts, and it lasts nearly 2½ hours. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeMay 31, 2024
The film has its flaws, but worriers will find much with which to identify. Read full review
60
Total FilmMatt GlasbyMay 28, 2024
There are some stunning moments, such as the eerily green-screened opener, and an unsettling underwater sequence up there with Dario Argento’s Inferno. But the 145-minute runtime feels increasingly indulgent, and Bonello borrows heavily from Kubrick, Lynch and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Read full review
60
Time OutOlly RichardsMay 23, 2024
Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi epic-cum-period-romance-cum-stalker-thriller is absolutely teeming with ideas. That they don’t all come together in an entirely convincing way doesn’t spoil the overall effect of something thought-provoking, very handsomely made, and appealingly weird. Read full review
60
IGNEmma StefanskyOct 12, 2023
While Bertrand Bonnello’s film is a timely, somewhat satirical send-up of dystopian futures and past traumas, The Beast doesn’t quite measure up to its heavy portents of doom. Read full review
60
VarietyGuy LodgeSep 5, 2023
Laden with enticing ideas and images that never quite activate each other, “The Beast” instead coagulates into a thick 146-minute triptych of general, fidgeting malaise, and strands a hard-working Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in a cross-time, cross-purposes relationship that keeps shape-shifting without getting us terribly involved. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerApr 25, 2024
In one of those odd happenstances of cinema, The Beast shares those themes of processing romantic trauma through temporal displacement with Alice Lowe’s Monty Python-esque Timestalker: but La bête lacks its pithiness and humanity. Read full review
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