Animal magnetism | 26 April 2018

When I first read that Beast is a serial-killer thriller my heart sank like a stone — yet more women raped, butchered, murdered; splendid, bring it on. But it is, in fact, fascinating and brilliant, and not like any serial-killer thriller you’ve seen before. This is because a woman owns it. Psychologically and emotionally. Not because she’s the actual killer, although if she were the killer would she need to work four times as hard to achieve the same notoriety as a man? Kill eight to his two?

But we mustn’t allow that to hold us up. Beast is a feature-length debut for writer/director Michael Pearce and it stars Jessie Buckley, who is phenomenal. She plays Moll, a tour guide who lives on Jersey with her controlling passive-aggressive mother (Geraldine James on top form, but then she’s never been on bottom form as far as I’m aware) and her father, who is slipping into dementia. They are bourgeois. Their carpets are beige and their sofa is beige, which is always a sign, as well as a bit of a cliché, admittedly. (I once met some bourgeois people who liked red, and some pattern.) Moll’s older brother and sister are, if you like, perfectly beige too, as they are wholly conventional, but Moll? She is troubled and unhappy. We understand this immediately, just as we understand that there is a darkness in her past (which will become clear later). We also understand that she has somehow been forced to repress what might be her true nature. We understand all this because Buckley is phenomenal at conveying Moll’s mental state, the throb of pain under her skin, and her isolation and confusion.