To say that it’s a slow time at the movies right now would be a bit of an understatement. August is always a pretty bad month for distributors and theaters, given that folks don’t really want to head out in the heat and the lack of “major” product coming from the studios, the combo of which creates a feedback loop that only breaks right around when Labor Day passes by, and the better-off members of the film press are living the high life up in Venice. COVID-related delays and vertically-integrated streamers and whatnot have only made that even worse for this specific August, which means it’s slim pickings at the multiplex, at least for the next few weeks. But those in need of entertainment (or air-conditioning or popcorn) shouldn’t regard Baltasar Kormakur’s Beast with the same skepticism that they normally give Hot January titles because this would undoubtedly be the cream of the August crop in any other year: A tightly-paced, well-acted, smartly-constructed-and-directed high-concept genre picture that lives up to the premise of Idris Elba fighting off a giant-ass lion.
That tiny logline should be all you need to be convinced to see this movie, but I’m not writing Netflix synopses, so I’ll elaborate: Beast is a prototypical survival movie. Nate Daniels (Elba), a New York-based doctor who recently lost his ex-wife, takes his young girls to visit her hometown in South Africa and to reconnect with his friend Martin (Sharlto Copley, somehow not in a heelish role), who became an anti-poacher thanks to his friendship with the family. Everyone in the family is dealing with some amount of pain in their own ways, but it’s the eldest girl, Mere (Iyana Halley), who most acutely feels the loss, with her younger sister Norah (Leah Sava Jefferies) caught in the crossfire between her occasional verbal spats with her dad. Sensing the strain (and the girls’ need for novelty, given that there’s no WiFi or cell service), Martin takes the family on a private safari through the grounds that he patrols, including one spot where few folks are allowed to tread: here there be lions, though the regal jungle cats typically don’t fuck with people unless given reason to. But what none of them know is that a group of poachers massacred a pride the night before, leaving only a vengeful male scarred and bloodied from the ordeal. He’s killed two of the poachers and is hungry for vengeance, letting God, presumably voiced by James Earl Jones in an alternate version of the film, sort out his victims. After encountering the aftermath of one of his slaughters and trying to save one of his victims, the family finds themselves trapped in Martin’s Jeep, while the anti-poacher bleeds out in a small pond, separated from the group following his attempts to pursue the creature. To survive the night, they’ll have to use their wits and bond, especially when the poachers come back to finish off what they’ve started.
The scant runtime, only 93-odd minutes from opening titles to end credits, means that there’s little time for bullshit, which is how most survival movies like this should be structured, if not accompanied by some extraneous and/or adjacent plot. There’s little consideration of the economics of poaching or ponderous dips into existential tragedy (though that’s not a slight at Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, which is a fantastic film), and even if there are feints in those directions – the violence inherent in some anti-poaching efforts does come up briefly, and Elba’s backstory, involving his distant ex-wife’s death from cancer plays a role in making the arcs between predator and prey compelling – they’re not enough to overwhelm the film’s propulsion. It does not, like in The Revenant, peak early or supplements a greater narrative, a key influence to which Beast owes a certain amount of stylistic debt (at least applied to the animal-on-human violence, which is executed here with the same realism and lack of indestructibility on the part of the star), which the cast and crew have acknowledged throughout the film’s press tour. But beyond the specifics of re-purposing the meat of the bear attack and altering its application to a jungle cat – it’s also wisely repositioned as a climax, where the mortal peril that Elba faces can have its full effect – Kormakur’s camerawork takes less from Innaritu than it does the patient tracking shots of Alfonso Cuaron, most of which are wonderfully blocked. The Steadicam follows the action clearly and smartly, with little jitter, and emphasizes the characters in their environment rather than just strictly following their movements, which is unlike the kind of third-person view that we normally see in films like this.
But to compliment all of that, Beast contains one key feature that a whole lot of “animals attack” movies elide: our monster is not evil, being not an expression of a vengeful nature coming to strike man in his so-called “safe” environments but rather a direct result of man’s assault on his. Elba and his family (as well as a host of villagers, whose mangled corpses we see strewn about their homes) are simply caught in a rage-and-grief-fueled rampage, where every human is seen as a threat by a creature who’s endured great pain. There’s a tragic notion to the whole ordeal, with the King of the Jungle being brought low by man’s violence, that plays similarly to the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Cujo, where the good family dog just so happens to be driven mad by rabies. This notion makes the film bite more than one might expect, with the Lion being a deeply sympathetic villain, and, notably, Kormakur doesn’t emphasize any violence towards the creature that isn’t necessary for an innocent’s survival at his hands. The film’s conclusion is underplayed, with Kormakur and company choosing to focus on the humans in the moment instead of what’s happening to the lion, which is about as far away from the exploding shark at the end of Jaws. There won’t be some great fear of lions that emerges from Beast, partially due to the remoteness of the setting, but also to the genuine care exercised by its makers in stressing that this is not normal: That if one respects nature and those around them, you won’t have to suffer what Elba and company endure here. Yet you should definitely endure the August heat and check this one out because it’s the rarest of all miracles: A late summer mid-budget genre picture that is well worth the time and sweat.