Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, Beast follows a recently widowed husband (Idris Elba) who returns to South Africa, where he first met his wife, on a long-planned trip with his two young daughters to a game reserve managed by an old family friend and fellow wildlife biologist. Soon a ferocious wild lion, craving human flesh, begins attacking them and killing anyone in its path, leading to a battle for survival.
Anyone who has known me long enough knows that I can be a big sucker for creature features so when the first trailer for this film dropped I was instantly sold on the premise. Idris Elba vs a rogue lion? Hell yeah, give me that. But to be honest, when I went in I was expecting mostly mindless entertainment but instead, I got a damn well-crafted film that had me gripped in its teeth from start to finish.
While it doesn’t offer anything majorly new and is pretty simple with its premise it gets straight to the point and is surprisingly compelling, thanks to a lot of effort on various levels that you wouldn’t really expect for a creature feature these days. It works really well as a family survival story with a simple set of characters that are given great performances all around and are also given enough development time in the film for us to care for them as they are thrown into the lion’s den, literally.
No matter what kind of film Idris Elba is in he always brings his A-game to the table and here is no different. He plays the part of a father who is trying to protect his kids while carrying a lot of emotional baggage, perfectly expressing his emotions not only through good dialogue but also fantastic facial expressions. Even if you were not listening to what his character was saying you could see everything he is feeling in every scene just from his eyes alone, whether it be fear or sadness. He truly can hold his own in a leading role as shown in several projects in the past and this one is no different.
Iyana Halley and Leah Sava Jeffries also turn in really solid performances as the daughters and are thankfully not portrayed as dumb or annoying in the film. They act the appropriate age of their characters and show themselves to be just as intelligent and competent as their father even when they are feeling terrified.
We also get a great supporting role from Sharlto Copley who I had not seen on the big screen for a really long time and continues to show how truly underrated he is as an actor.
These four together share good chemistry as well as perfectly display realistic anxiety and fear that a family would feel in a situation like this. There are moments with these characters that are meant to have an emotional impact on viewers that are done well enough even when it is something we have seen before in other films featuring family drama in a survival situation. But from start to finish you are with these characters throughout the whole ordeal, and as long as you are invested in them then the film has succeeded in getting you hooked.
This film as I mentioned is a man vs nature creature feature but one that has perfect amounts of tension and thrills all the way through to give people a really good time. And this film surprisingly takes a more realistic approach when it comes to this genre by defying some of the typical tropes other creature features follow, like wasting time on pointless characters, having cheap scares, and having the creature be completely invincible to pretty much everything until it dies in some over- the-top way. The film largely focuses on the main four for the entire story, keeping a grounded perspective and making us care for them as they are hunted by a dangerous predator.
The scares and action scenes that occur are very well done and get your adrenaline running as they are directed in such a way that you feel like you are in the situation and feel just as terrified as the characters being attacked. There were a number of times I was jumping in my seat and cringing at the graphic injuries characters were getting that were treated very seriously and sometimes gave me flashbacks to that gruesome bear attack scene in The Revenant.
And as for the titular beast itself, I was very surprised by how it was treated compared to other killer animals. For starters, the film begins showing you exactly why the lion has gone rogue and is viciously attacking humans, which is something I have never really seen before in a creature feature as you never get any reasonable or logical explanation to why a certain animal is just so pissed off with humans and wants to kill only humans. The lion is also not treated as an immortal killing machine either. It bleeds, it gets wounded and it has realistic limitations. Yes, it still has enough strength to rip humans apart but you can tell it gets weaker than how it started out the more injuries it receives. The lion is truly terrifying as this film’s monster and while it is entirely CGI it actually looks really good in a lot of scenes even for a film with a budget that is way less compared to the 2019 version of The Lion King. I also like how it gets defeated in the end with a subtle setup at the beginning that avoids the typical over-the-top creature deaths of other films.
But what really stood out with this film compared to other creature features was the beautiful visuals and outstanding camera work. This film makes full use of South Africa’s natural and wild beauty, giving the film gorgeous looks as well as a very tension-filled atmosphere in an isolated location. Having been to Africa myself I always had this unnerving feeling of being watched wherever I went in the really wild areas and this film managed to perfectly capture that feeling on a technical level, making viewers feel paranoid about their surroundings both during the day and especially at night where you could barely see anything but something could see you. It’s a perfect combination of beauty and horror that gives special life to this creature feature, the likes of which I had not seen since The Ghost and the Darkness, a film that also happens to involve killer lions.
The camera work and cinematography were on a whole different level in this film, with a high usage of unbreaking one-take shots that have you completely absorbed into the intensity that is going on. It isn’t to the extent of 1917, where the whole film feels like it was done in one shot with hidden cuts, but it’s pretty close just because of how frequent and so perfectly crafted these one-takes are.
Like the visuals, the one takes also add to the tension-filled atmosphere and really get the viewers to feel absorbed into everything on screen. It is absolutely brilliant and anyone who is a fan of greatly executed one-takes is going to adore this film.
I also love the African-themed score in this film by Steven Price who had done music for several Edgar Wright films including Last Night in Soho, which was one of my favorites from last year. It really added a lot to the sound design and thrills this film had to give and certainly had my heart racing.
Overall, Beast is a really fun modern creature feature that is definitely worth the watch. It provides solid entertainment and delivers on the promise of its premise but also has a surprising amount of effort put into it when it could have easily been completely mindless. It keeps you hooked from the start all the way to the finish in a nice tight story that gives you the good stuff plus way more. I’m going to give Beast an A- = 90.
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