Beast (2022) Review
“We’re in his territory now.”
Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast is a “creature feature” that boasts frantic energy and small-scale thrills to stand out from the pack. Idris Elba and Sharlto Copley elevate the standard screenplay; setting up common stakes within the first fifteen minutes that feel much more impactful due to the performances at hand. Even with every telegraphed narrative beat, I found myself engaged through the simple nature of the film itself and on overt focus on being a monster movie first. Though the film features a creature that exists in our real world, there’s a purposeful lack of realism that allows the film to feel much more playful than the stakes at hand. Kormákur and writer Ryan Engle seem to know that this is an outlandish tale in the first place and roll with it every step of the way – finding some truly thrilling moments as our leads try to escape a menacing lion that would make even Scar from The Lion King proud.
Recently widowed Dr. Nate Samuels (Elba) brings his daughters Merideth (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffrries) back to his hometown in South Africa to reconnect with their past and honor their mother. They reunite with Nate’s childhood friend, Martin Battles (Copley) who is a biologist and manager of the Mopani Reserve – featuring a large density of wild animals including lions, leopards, and rhinos. Kormákur’s choice of sweeping longshots add a deep sense of immersion into this world as the audience is first introduced to the wildlife and their habitat; the fantastic CG work in particular adds to this as well. The stakes are set up so neatly with a bow on top, and though this may irk some viewers, I found it to be so deliberate in its intent; focusing on the simple drama of a survival story between this family. And as the setup is cleanly concluded, the film dives right into its thriller antics.
Within a film that I fully expected Idris Elba to face a lion in hand-to-hand combat, I left my sense of realism at the door. If one goes into this one expecting a naturalistic survival story – there’s no doubt that one will be disappointed as well. This is a movie that plays into such a standardized storytelling structure but sticks out thanks to Kormákur’s immersive direction and thrilling monster moments. There’s a blatant anti-poaching message that is extremely simplistic but adds enough gumption to twist the narrative into one where our leads must escape the evils of humanity as well. This is not a film that frames all these beautiful beasts as monsters; in fact, it does quite the opposite. In creating this survival narrative, the tale reduces humans to their purest animalistic instincts as well – showcasing that there will always be anomalies within the animal kingdom; mankind included. That said, there are some truly menacing “monster” moments here that would put a majority of modern horror films to shame.
Glaring dialogue issues, heavily telegraphed narrative beats, and a bit of inconsistent pacing within the third act really didn’t deter my enjoyment of this film due to its keen focus on being an entirely engaging 90-minute popcorn thriller. This is genuinely one of the better “monster movies” to come out recently and, in my humble opinion, inadvertently the best Jurassic Park sequel since the original.
