For a film that begins in 1910 during the Great Flood of Paris, The Beast feels achingly alive with the anxiety of existing in 2024. Based in part on Henry James’s 1903 novella, The Beast in the Jungle, about a man who believes his whole life is steered toward an impending catastrophe, the latest and tenth film by Bertrand Bonello finds that same “deep-seated feeling that something terrible will occur” in the heart of a woman named Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), and bends eternity around it. Across three lifetimes, Seydoux plays a lovelorn woman who waits for doom. Whatever that doom is, it doesn’t matter; it might as well be the apocalypse. If that seems like the stuff of a great, sappy cinematic romance, it is, but the work of Bonello tends to refuse simple categories. The French multi-hyphenate (director-writer-composer) makes destabilizing films, ever-shifting emulsions of form and genre. Read the Mercury's whole review.