Plot details for In a Lonely Place and Beast below
Michael Pearce's 2017 film Beast struck me as a modern update of Nicholas Ray's noir 1950 classic In a Lonely Place, which starred Humphrey Bogart as Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele, a man suspected of murdering a young woman. He is given an alibi by his neighbour Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame). Dixon and Steele fall love but his violent tendencies lead her to believe he may be guilty. At the end of the movie Dixon is revealed to be innocent, but it's too late for his and Laurel's relationship. The film states even if Dixon is innocent of murder he is still capable of terrible violence.
Beast also involves a woman in love with a man suspected of murder. Moll (Jessie Buckley) is in her 20s but still lives with her mother. She meets Pascal (Johnny Flynn), who represents an escape from her current life but who may be behind the murders of several women. Moll tells the police she met Pascal night of her birthday, which was when one of the murders occurred. However, Moll suspects Pascal may be guilty. This is a similar dynamic to In a Lonely Place but Beast inverts Ray's film by having Moll be an unreliable narrator, someone the audience begins to suspect is the murderer.
We learn Moll attacked one of her classmates in supposed self-defense but it's revealed it wasn't. I would argue Moll is the Dixon Steele of Beast rather than Pascal, who is sort of a red herring. The film is about the beast inside Moll. What makes Buckley's performance marvelous is her ability to imbue Moll with ambiguity while allowing the audience to still sympathize with her.Writer/director Pearce doesn't want Moll simply to be a caricature of mental illness.
Beast finally is a film about losing control to take control of one's life. Moll has to unleash the beast to become what she feels is the hero of her own story. Moll may be completely free at the film's finale, a weird sort of triumph. And Buckley is a triumph as well.
