BEAST – Review

(l-r) Jessie Buckley as Moll and Johnny Flynn as Pascal, in BEAST. Photo: Kerry Brown, courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

BEAST is a gripping, suspenseful film that mixes forbidden love, rebellion and murder, set on the English Channel island of Jersey, a place of natural beauty with a dark history, a stormy drama with a star-making performance by Jessie Buckley as the young woman at its center.

Moll Huntsford (Jessie Buckley) is a 27-year-old woman living with her parents in a stiflingly restrictive but affluent home on the island of Jersey. Her stern mother Hilary (Geraldine James) watches Moll like a hawk, and Moll spends her days is either supervising her mentally-confused father or working as a tour guide for the busloads of retirees who visit the picaresque island. By chance, she meets a stranger named Pascal Renouf (Johnny Flynn), a handsome, enigmatic man who makes his living as hunter and handyman. Pascal comes to Moll’s rescue after her night at the pub but the way he does it suggests he might be as much a danger as the man he drives off. With a mix of fear and fascination, she accepts a ride home from the mysterious stranger. Pascal is hard to read and has a whiff of menace to him but he also has a compelling mix of rough charm and sly humor, which sparks something long-buried within Moll.

When Pascal turns up at her family home the next day, Moll’s mother Hilary is hostile and clearly disdainful of this work-class character on her doorstep, yet Moll impulsively invites him to join them for dinner. At dinner, her mother asks Pascal if he is new to the island, to which he replies that no, he is a native whose ancestors have been on the island since the Norman conquest. He then adds, with a sly smile, “what are you doing on my land?”

The scene reveals something of Pascal’s nature, and also underscores the social gap between Moll’s family and him, establishing the tension between their two very different worlds. Meeting him reveals a wildness already within Moll that has been suppressed by her stifling family. Like Pascal, she has a history of violence, and they are drawn to each other like tamed and wild versions of the same species. While she recognizes they are kindred spirits, Moll is tore between her “dark side” and Pascal, and her family and a wish to “be good.”

BEAST is as brooding and haunting as the island it is set on, and powerful suspenseful tale that showcases some outstanding new talent.

One might wonder who is the “beast” of the title? Is it the raw, wild Pascal, a hunter who nearly blends into the landscape? Or is it Moll, tightly controlled by her family but with a hidden caged animal aspect? Or is it the killer stalking the island’s small rural community?

When Moll and Pascal meet, the island is gripped with fear and actively searching for a missing girl, the fourth one to have vanished. When her body is found buried near a farmer’s field, suspicion falls on Pascal, Moll is torn between defending the man she has fallen in love with or standing with her family and community.

There was a real Beast of Jersey in the 1960s, a child molester who evaded authorities for ten years. In his first feature film, writer/director Michael Pearce drew on his own experiences growing up on Jersey. The writer/director wanted to contrast the island’s wild natural beauty with its stifling small town conservative culture. Pearce describes Jersey as a place of stunning natural beauty where people feel safe but a place with a dark side, with legends of ghosts and witches, and a history of Nazi occupation and the Beast.

What fires up this film most is the riveting performance by Buckley, an Irish-born, stage-trained young actress with wild curly red hair and the capacity to morph from a shy innocent to a woman who might be capable of murder. Her chemistry with Johnny Flynn, an equally gifted actor, is electric yet it is Buckley who often dominates the screen.

Pearce wields his camera with impressive skill, offering formally composed and cramped scenes of Moll’s restrictive family gatherings and community events, and loose, impressionistic hand-held camera shot for scenes between Moll and Pascal. Among the most striking is a scene where Moll’s family gathers at the country club to celebrate her more-conventional sister’s engagement. The family is upset by Pascal’s slightly less formal attire. Pascal shrugs off their objections with a wry smile, as if he was aware he was pushing the limits, but Moll’s reaction is more emotional. A couple of other scenes where she engages with the community suggest that Moll is not always grounded in reality.

The film is not just about the murder mystery or the love story, but has layers of meaning about the balance between conforming to community expectations versus the impulse towards freedom, between an orderly built world and the wild natural environment. Pearce shot partly on Jersey itself, taking advantage of the island’s striking wild landscapes. That nature beauty was then contrasted against scenes of Moll giving the same scripted spiel about those landscapes to tour buses of retirees. While the story has a touch of “Wuthering Heights” at times, with the lovers and the landscape, this is its own unique tale.

The powerful performances of Buckley and Flynn keep us engrossed in this tale as it unfolds, although the ending is a bit of a let- down. Still, Pearce gets some much right in his atmospheric debut film, that one can look forward to more from him. Almost certainly, we will see more of the extremely-watchable and gifted Jessie Buckley,

BEAST opens Friday, May 25, at the Tivoli and Plaza Frontenac theaters.

RATING: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars