What the f*** are you talking about?!

Note: to find this film on this site you need search for "La bête", even though the title then says "The Beast"!

"The Beast" is a French film from 2023 that will leave you scratching your head. I am rapidly growing to hate art house sci-fi. Wokeness does not help.

I will endeavor not to spoil while trying to paint the big picture.

The film is set in three time periods: 1910, 2014 and 2044. The lead actress, Léa Seydoux, and lead actor, George MacKay, appear in each period as different but related characters.

In the film's reality, the "past lives" drivel espoused by gypsy fortune tellers is true and accepted scientifically. In 2044, an AI controls everything. It wishes people to become emotionless drones by purging their emotions linked to past lives encoded in their DNA. Not only is that absurd, but the lead characters don't seem to be direct descendants of their "past lives" counterparts. Thanks, I hate it.

Léa Seydoux looks like somebody hit Sydney Sweeney with a beauty stick. Alas, her good looks and acting are not enough to save this French mess of a movie. At one point her character yells to no one, "What the f*** are you talking about?!" Indeed.

Adding insult to absurdity is a body-positive, eye-spacing-positive, ghetto-chique, lesbian android of color. What the woke? This is enough to peg my woke meter, so I'll ignore the homicidal incel white male character.

And there are pigeons. Pigeons are a bad omen that indicate the director has jumped the artistic shark. I point to "The Remains of the Day" and the finale of Battlestar Galactica (2004) as other examples.

I expected David Lynch to do a cameo in a scene at the end, but no. The director says he was not drawing on Lynch for the final set. Sure.

In sum, "The Beast" is a mostly incoherent artistic rambling about nothing and everything. In the year 2044, we will have Robo-Lakeisha. We were promised Barbie-bots!