Most actors employ a lot of tricks, but I couldn’t spot any of Jessica Buckley’s in “Beast.” In this revelatory performance, she plays a severely oppressed young woman living under the thumb of family and community expectations who finds a way to break free through a romance with a local undesirable.
Moll lives on a lovely British island, working as a bus guide for tourists. Her older siblings are already married and started families, and it’s not hard to see that her mother (Geraldine James) views her as the disappointment of the family. As the story opens Moll is attending a birthday party, which turns out to be her own, but she’s treated morse as the servant than the guest of honor.
She has a chance encouter with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), an unnerving fellow who spends his days at odd jobs and poaching. They fall into an uneasy romance, which is bothersome to most everyone Moll knows, which is the main thrust of the appeal.
But when local girls start turning up strangled, Pascal becomes the chief suspect. Moll defends him but harbors her own doubts. Her mind starts to fracture, resulting in terrible visions in which she herself is a perpetrator.
It’s an audacious feature film debut for writer/director Michael Pearce, who along with Buckley draws an intimate, unsettling portrait of a young woman who’s been a target all her life. Finally given a chance to express herself, she finds that freedom can become its own prison.
Video extras are unfortunately rather modest. They consist of a gallery of photo stills from the production and a making-of documentary short.
I had never heard of Jessie Buckley before, but I shan't soon forget her after her ravishing, emotionally outsized performance in the erotic thriller, "Beast."
Buckley appeared on one of those "anybody can be a star" TV programs in Great Britain a few years ago, and has since made a name for herself as a singer, stage and TV actress. This is her first starring film role and, if we're lucky, the prelude to many more.
There's a startling immediacy to her screen presence; we don't sense the usual thespian tricks and remove of the craft. Buckley is just there, right in front of us, never hiding.
She plays Moll, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do family living on a picturesque, unnamed British island. When I first glimpsed her, I thought Moll to be a teenager, but that's just how everyone treats her. Geraldine James plays her disciplinarian mother, who views Moll as a mere extension of herself and her household.
Moll's older siblings (Oliver Maltman and Shannon Tarbet) are already married and starting families, so she's expected to stay at home, caring for her dementia-stricken father, and offer endless obedience. She works in the day as a tour bus guide, droning to blue-haired ladies about the island where she's lived her whole life, but which holds no enchantment.
She's upstaged at her own birthday party, and exercises a rare moment of rebellion by sneaking away to a club, dancing until dawn. We sense this may just be the happiest night of Moll's life, until the fellow she's with gets handsy. Luckily Pascal Renouf (Johnny Flynn) shows up to chase him away, wielding the rifle he's been using to poach rabbits.
Problem is, Pascal is far scarier than the fellow he ran off. With his hollow face etched with scars, framed by scruffy pale hair and beard, blue eyes that stare with unnerving clarity, ragged clothes and hands casually stained with blood, Pascal is like a primordial version of man sprung from the sea, a hunter wandering among the prey.
Moll is instantly captivated by him, and they soon begin a torrid affair that causes much frowning. At first it's just because of tired class divisions -- he wears black jeans to a country club dinner! -- but soon there are whisperings about his sordid past.
More disturbingly, a series of murders is plaguing the isle, one dead girl turning up after another. They've all been raped and suffocated, their mouths stuffed with raw earth. Pascal easily becomes the prime suspect, and by extension Moll becomes a target herself for the community's ire.
Clifford (Trystan Gravelle), a police officer who's long harbored a crush for her, tries to warn Moll off, but is rebuffed. More official inquiries soon follow; the lies start to pile up.
Moll, a girl who's been a victim her entire life, is resentful that everyone is pressing down on Pascal, ruining her first -- possibly only? -- chance at love. But part of her can't shake the suspicion the accusations are true.
She even starts to have daydreams about committing unspeakable acts herself. A tidbit from her own past reminds us that sudden, sharp violence is not unknown to her. Moll occasionally plucks random long hairs she discovers growing from her body.
Is Pascal the beast, or she? Or maybe they both are, and he just wears his malevolence more outwardly?
Writer/director Michael Pearce, making his feature film debut, gives us an astonishingly evocative film in which the spoken words carry the least of the information to the audience. Much of the movie is spent just looking at Moll, seeing how awkward and timid she is, then watching her grow -- not always in a positive way -- in the warmth of Pascal's seething glow.
Buckley has an amazingly frank, raw, almost feral beauty. With her one-sided smile and tangle of crimson curls, we know in our hearts Moll was always the bullied girl at school, the one they called ugly who never had a boyfriend. She's internalized that abuse to such an extent it's become an intrinsic part of her shriveled personality.
She is the unwanted, the woman everyone takes for granted. Now someone finally wants her for her, and she throws herself into that desire with frightening abandon.
There's one brief, wonderful scene where Moll has come home after a night out with Pascal. Her hands are filthy, and she sits on the couch, grinding her crusted fingernails into the pristine cushions, leaving tracks of filth. Her face beams with dark satisfaction in this act, the good little girl finally finding the fierce woman inside.
"Beast" is a gorgeous, sensuous, forbidding work of cinema. It's like a warm embrace, and then it starts to squeeze with a killer's strength.
It's perhaps no surprise there isn't much in the way of narrative in "Another Year," since it's a movie composed largely by actors.
Yes, Brit director Mike Leigh wrote the screenplay -- even receiving an Oscar nomination for it. But like many of his films, it was written over the course of months with the cast continually improvising dialogue and scenes, which were incorporated into the script when it came time to shoot. Leigh's an auteur of group efforts.
The result is a film of wonderful performances, but few happenings. It's less pure storytelling than a peek inside a small circle of people who feel authentic and three-dimensional. An audience isn't so much watching them do things as visiting with them and observing their conversations and interactions.
I found "Another Year" highly engaging but not entirely satisfying. While never dull, it can't escape a certain sense of cyclical malaise. Even the title and framing device of dividing the tale into the four seasons lend a sense of inevitability and familiarity.
Things revolve around Tom and Gerri, an upper-middle-class London couple of late middle years. He's a geologist, she's a psychiatric counselor, and they enjoy the unspectacular comforts of a nice little home and a gardening plot in the country.
Played marvelously by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, they're a happy couple and good people, but not flawless. They take a certain amount of delight in indulging the flaws and vices of their circle of acquaintanceships. They love nothing more than inviting a few of them over, and exchanging knowing looks and half-smiles as their guests make fools of themselves.
Tom and Gerri aren't necessarily taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, but they certainly don't make any grand efforts to guide these so-called friends out of the dead ends of their own making. They've taken "live and let live" and turned it into a source for their own amusement.
Their chief guest and entertainer is Mary (Lesley Manville), a co-worker of Gerri whose love life is a shambles. In her 50s but dressing like a 20-something tart, Mary's need for companionship seems to dominate her entire personality. At the same time, this chatterbox can't stop talking about how great her life is going and how excited she is about the future.
Perhaps Mary needs her bubble of perpetual optimism, otherwise she'd realize how miserable she is.
Mary even carries on a flirtation with Joe (Oliver Maltman), Tom and Gerri's 30-year-old son. At first her come-ons seem playful and tongue-in-cheek, until he brings home a girlfriend (Karina Fernandez) and we see how crushed she is. Mary probably didn't really aspire to a relationship with Joe, but it's a reminder of her diminishing options.
Ironically, Mary has her own admirer, Ken (Peter Wight), another acquaintance of Tom and Gerri. Divorced and overweight, Ken is a two-fisted drinker -- literally. He's at retirement age, but can't imagine quitting, because what would he do with his life? His existence consists of his job, and drinking so he can forget about his job.
It makes us wonder: Do Tom and Gerri have any real friendships with people they consider their equals? Can they even conceive of the idea that to someone else, they are the Mary and Ken of that social circle? I suspect the answer on both counts is no.
Imelda Staunton has a small role as Janet, a woman suffering from crippling depression who comes to see Gerri for help. She's unresponsive, can't sleep, is irritable and morose. Asked what she would like to improve her life, she dully responds, "Another life." Janet is a woman completely at the end of her rope, her path leading to some kind of major upheaval or tragedy.
In any other movie, Janet's crisis would be a breaking point in the plot. But "Another Year," it's merely decoration. After a couple of scenes, Janet disappears, never to be heard from again, and we wonder why the film bothered introducing her to be dismissed so abruptly.
I enjoyed the time I spent with Tom, Gerri and the gang, but I think the aesthetic of this sort of filmmaking has a built-in set of diminishing returns.
If the goal is not to dramatize real life but depict it in all its untidiness and ungilded, quotidian banality, then the more successful the movie is the less necessary it becomes -- and people realize they don't need to buy a ticket to have the experience.
