The Beast (2023): Tenderness After the End
by Fatimah Allawaim
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is not a film about the future — it’s about what remains human when the future finally arrives. Beneath its science-fiction premise lies something intimate: the anatomy of waiting, the ache of memory, and the resilience of hope through the eyes of a woman who keeps feeling even when the world asks her to forget.
Gabrielle, played with a fragile stillness by Léa Seydoux, moves through three timelines, three lives, and one recurring wound — the fear of pain, the repetition of loss. The machine that promises to “purify” her from emotion is only another form of violence: it asks her to erase what makes her alive. Bonello’s dystopia doesn’t fear death or destruction; it fears feeling. It fears the uncontrollable tenderness that comes with being human.
Watching Gabrielle walk through this sterile, algorithmic world feels like watching a heart trying to beat underwater. Her every movement carries the quiet weight of waiting — waiting for love, for meaning, for something that might never return. She isn’t searching for perfection, but for recognition: a moment where pain is not pathology but proof of life.
From a female perspective, the film becomes an elegy about endurance. Gabrielle’s body and memory are not passive vessels; they are archives of emotion. She carries grief the way others carry identity. Where men in her world build, calculate, and rationalize, she remembers — and remembrance itself becomes rebellion.
Bonello’s cinematic language is as cold as it is intimate. Every frame feels like glass — transparent, fragile, and reflective. Yet beneath that surface, emotion trembles. The film moves between centuries, from 1910 to 2044, but time is only a metaphor for longing. No matter how far technology advances, humanity remains tethered to its oldest question: how do we live with what we’ve lost?
Gabrielle’s relationship with Louis shifts through time, sometimes tender, sometimes violent, always incomplete. He is both presence and ghost — the recurring embodiment of what she cannot release. Their encounters echo like déjà vu, each one a variation of the same unfinished sentence. What binds them isn’t romance; it’s repetition. They are haunted by the same desire: to love without the risk of pain. And yet, that desire is precisely what destroys them.
Bonello frames love as an act of self-recognition — terrifying and transcendent. The more Gabrielle tries to cleanse herself of emotion, the more she becomes aware of her own capacity to feel. The machine that erases fear also erases tenderness, and in doing so, it exposes the truth: to exist without pain is to exist without depth.
The Beast, then, is not the world or the machine — it’s the part of us that still feels after being told not to. It’s the stubborn pulse of empathy in an age of indifference. Gabrielle’s tragedy is that she cannot unlearn her humanity, even when it isolates her. Her gift is the same as her curse: she waits, she remembers, she feels.
For me, The Beast is a film about the sacredness of vulnerability. Hope here is not naïve; it’s revolutionary. It’s the decision to keep yearning in a time that rewards detachment. Bonello uses the language of dystopia to tell a love story that’s too human to die — one that asks whether healing means forgetting, or simply learning to live with the fracture.
In the final moments, when Gabrielle faces her reflection, we understand what the film has been saying all along: pain is not an error in the system. It’s the evidence that the soul still exists.
