Beast (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Beast (2017) – M. Pearce

A serial killer is loose on the tiny Channel Island of Jersey (nearer to France than England but containing a mix of cultures).  We are introduced to Moll (Jessie Buckley) whose perspective we take – but at times it seems a very unreliable perspective!  Moll has a dark secret in her past and, although somewhere in her mid-20s, she seems to be under the protection of her domineering mother.  Clearly, she wants to rebel and on the night of her birthday garden party she escapes to the local dance club, gets drunk and then very nearly sexually assaulted until she is rescued by Pascal Renouf (Johnny Flynn), an odd but attractive young man out poaching in the early morning.  She’s from the high end of town and he’s rough so her family frowns on their relationship (which does seem impetuous).  Eventually it becomes clear that he is a prime suspect for the serial killings but she takes it upon herself to lie for him to give him an alibi without ever knowing for sure that he is innocent.  So, this is the central tension of the film – but it isn’t really a “woman in distress” picture of the usual sort (despite its links to Hitchcock’s Suspicion, 1941) because it seems eminently plausible that Moll herself is the “beast” of the title.  Not that she would be the serial killer but certainly there is something wrong in her, something that has led her to rebel against society and even into violence and darkness (beyond just despising the constraints that her mother places upon her).  Pearce, in his feature debut (he also wrote the script), controls the tension admirably until late in the film when all is revealed and Moll -- and we viewers -- don’t know exactly what to do.  It is a hesitantly pregnant moment and a finely written one.  That said, I’m not quite sure I’m convinced by the subsequent ending or the motivation underlying the action taken, however – a few more minutes of denouement may have cast a bit more light on questions of character.