Beast Movie Review: Barely manages to startle us 

In a time when mainstream cinema was becoming all about saving planets, universes, multiverses, time, space, and all of reality, one tends to yearn for a simple story. Beast, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, derives its appeal from one such simple premise - it's about just one man trying to save his family from a vengeful beast. Nate (Idris Elba) goes on a trip to a game reserve in South Africa with his daughters and gets hunted down by a rogue lion. 

Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Cast: Idris Elba, Sharlto Copley, Leah Sava Jeffries, Iyana Halley

Beast starts with a violent scene that tells us why we must dread the eponymous animal. The film wastes no time in setting up the characters, their history, and their interpersonal dynamics through a rapid succession of fairly competent scenes. Idris Elba plays a single dad with two daughters, one going through her rebellious teen years and the younger child is there as an audience surrogate who voices out our frustration at her walking cliche of a teen sister. Nate has been recently widowed and you already see it coming: His problem with his elder daughter is going to be about how he “was never there” while their mother was dying. We know then that the rest of the film is going to be all about whether or not he mends his relationship with the daughters while trying to survive through danger. We have seen this a thousand times but it works well enough to supply the characters with a working dynamic that generates enough drama to propel the plot forward. 

Even though Beast is not trying to reinvent the wheel, it does redeem itself to a considerable extent by not taking its audience for granted, especially when it comes to its making and performances. The long, sweeping single shots keep us engaged, despite the fact that you can spot the stitching together of multiple shots at places. The lion had to look as realistic as possible since everything in the film hinged upon us sharing the dread of the primary characters. Through a brilliant confluence of nifty camera work, careful use of shadows, and cogent VFX, the lion comes to life in all its terrifying glory. 

Beast understands what we are truly in for - some gritty Elba-on-lion action, so it fills in the slots for plot essentials like character motivations and inciting incidents in the tritest way possible. The plot momentum is driven by a chain of coincidences that we have been trained by now to scroll down and hit ‘accept’ like we would for a free software agreement. Despite us giving it some leeway, the film still manages to pile on more coincidences. There is a scene where Elba goes looking for the keys to a getaway car but when he can’t find them, his daughter says “you don’t know how to hot-wire a car?” and he replies something along the lines of “Why would I, I'm just a doctor.” The film thinks it is clever to subvert genre cliches like these but then goes on to add a whole bunch of said cliches. Like when Elba and his daughters are stranded in the middle of a forest, hiding in the car from a prowling lion, that is exactly when the elder daughter decides to walk out of the car to go look for her missing uncle, which as you guessed, ends up making things monumentally worse for everyone involved. 

Idris Elba’s performance wonderfully magnifies the looming threat while Sharlto Copley’s Martin does what any good supporting character must do by reviving the plot momentum while it was just starting to go in circles. 

Although predictable in essence and in execution, the film does tend to deliver the genuine thrills and excitement that we expect of it. If not for anything, you could watch it for the one glorious moment where Idris Elba's character wrestles a force of nature with 650 psi of bite force and eventually manages to punch it in the face.