Beast (2022) – Review

“BEAST”

The Beast comes to us from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who’s directing credits consist of an episode of the series Trapped, as well as the Denzel Washington & Mark Wahlberg film; Two Guns (if you didn’t see that, don’t bother- it’s not very good).

This film is essentially a safari horror movie. The plot line involves a lion going rogue after his pride is killed by poachers, and so he starts lashing out at every human in sight. Meanwhile, American doctor Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) is on holiday with his daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) to visit their uncle Martin (Sharlto Copley) following the death of their mother, to reconnect with her homeland. However, during the safari they discover that a poaching village was wiped out by a lion, and they end up getting trapped in their jeep whilst being hunted by the lion.

If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s quite a by-the-numbers creature feature. It doesn’t help that there’ve been a lot of films quite like this already. It reminded me a lot of the recent shark movies that have come out like 47 Metres Down (2017) and In the Shallows (2016).

This film is not great, if I’m honest. For one thing, the comparisons to Jurassic Park that I saw after watching the film are rather apt. There were a couple of scenes that looked to be straight out of Jurassic Park, but as a whole, I noted more similarities to the noted shark movies. This film is also really boring. I didn’t help that there aren’t many characters which essentially means that there won’t be that high of a body count- especially considering that they had to fill a 93-minute runtime which means that they have to save some on-screen kills- most of the kills are done off-screen!

Since the lion showed up earlier than I expected you know that the characters have a lot of plot armour to begin with- especially considering that the daughters’ character arcs surrounding the death of their mother haven’t been fulfilled.

More than that though, some of these characters act really dumb. They put themselves into environments that put them at risk for not very good reasons. And that’s what this film essentially boils down to; Idris Elba versus a lion. Side point- the special effects aren’t great, the lions range from pretty good to ropey and aren’t always incredibly convincing.. Obviously they wouldn’t get a real trained lion to put through this as it would be too dangerous but, Life of Pi effects – this is not.

As for central performances, well, they all did fine. Idris Elba did well, and Shartlo Copley is good in pretty much anything he is in, and I think the two young actresses did well. This isn’t exactly a film you need to bring an A-grade performance to.

The cinematography really did my head in for this film, it was really weird! I don’t really blame them for the shots of real animals that they tried to get, since those are pretty difficult to do. But the biggest issue that I had with the film was for the way some scenes were shot. There’s a lot of parts that are shot at night in very dark environments- likely as a way to cover up some of the lesser special effects. But it also has another issue- the amount of times that they used long one-shot takes. It has a very similar issue to the way long shot takes were done in the Phantom of the Opera movie (I would recommend watching Lindsay Ellis’ video of that movie adaptation to know what I mean). The point of that kind of shot in a movie like this is to heighten tension and show how dangerous the situation is- but that doesn’t happen in this movie. There’s no jump-scares in this movie and that would actually be a good use of that take. These long takes don’t do anything like that, they just seem to be there because it looks really cool and it shows off the sets that they had. They’re also very hard to do and often look really janky, and that’s something that this film falls into repeatedly.

While the film doesn’t overstay its welcome, it still doesn’t feel like much happens in this movie- it should have maybe been a short movie or a TV special. It doesn’t help me that it’s so by-the-numbers that I found it really boring.

The Beast does an admirable attempt to do an anti-poaching message but as a whole it’s quite a boring and lifeless film with not much happening in it, some rather weak uses of long takes and some character arcs that aren’t as compelling as the writer and director think they are.