Fleapit revisited:The Beast.

Paris 2044, the streets are almost completely empty and everybody wears some kind of plague mask. It looks, of course, like the height of the Covid lockdown but it's never specified why people are either at home or wearing masks. Perhaps there just aren't that many people left. At some point in the previous twenty years something very bad has happened, or maybe several bad things, and it seems humanity as only survived thanks to the intervention of AI.

The payback for this seems to be that AI is now running things and people are considered by their new robot overloads as "useless" unless they have undergone a 'purification' process which erases them of all their negative emotions. Which might sound good but it also erases all emotions, all feelings, all humanity - which doesn't sound so good.

Bertrand Bonello's new film The Beast (La Bete in French, and based -  very loosely one imagines - on Henry James' 1903 novella The Beast In The Jungle) introduces us to the young, attractive, and intelligent Gabrielle Monnier (Lea Seydoux) who is stuck in a dead end job because she is reticent to undergo the purification process for fear of losing what it is that makes her herself.

Her best friend is an unboundaried human size doll given life called Kelly (Guslagie Malanda) and when Kelly and Gabrielle visit a club to dance (in 2044, there are themed clubs where you experience 1963, 1972, 1980, and - one assumes - a whole host of other years) she meets with Louis Lewandowski (George MacKay) whom she feels a bond, and an affinity, with.

But nothing physical or romantic happens between them because Gabrielle is bedevilled by her overwhelming belief that a truly terrible thing will happen in her life. She doesn't want to drag Louis into that so retreats further into her lonely and unfulfilling existence.

When she finally resigns herself to the purification process, something she continues to have grave doubts about, she is taken back to two previous lives. One in Paris 1910 where she is a successful pianist married to doll maker Georges (Martin Scali) and one in 2014 where she is trying to make it as a model or actress in Santa Barbara and house-sitting an impressive looking, though spookily empty, modernist pile.

Apart from her name, there are two other things that don't change when she visits these past lives. Firstly, in each of her incarnations she is weighed down by her belief that something terrible will happen - she calls it The Beast and it's what gives the film its name - and, secondly, each time she meets Louis. In Paris 1910 he's a courteous admirer and in 2014 he's an incel intent on retribution on women because, at the age of thirty, he has never had sex, kissed, or even held the hand of a female.

As we slowly work out what these past lives have done to the 2044 version of Gabrielle we are introduced to regular motifs that come to symbolise her fears and anxieties. There are pigeons, eyes, creepy dolls, floods, fire, and not particularly well performed karaoke versions of Roy Orbison's Evergreen. The more over-riding themes of the film include how we process trauma, how we deal with our negative emotions, how we protect ourselves from love because we fear it, and what does it mean to be a human if there is no humanity left.

It's not always an easy watch - and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to everyone, it can sometimes get a little indulgent, and it's confusing in places - though that sorts itself out rather majestically as the film plays out. The performances are top notch, there are some genuine jump scares, and though it reminded me in places of Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things, Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich, and even some episodes of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, it is, ultimately, a hugely original film and one I couldn't stop thinking about, and even identifying with, as I walked back from the cinema. We all have our beasts. It's up to us if we feed them or cage them.