Review: Beast (2022)

Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast is ideal late summer entertainment. Running only 93 minutes long and full of effective character moments and suspense sequences, the film wastes no time telling its story. It’s a film without pretense or excess. It’s just an effective entertainment machine, much like the efficient killing machine at its centre: a crazed African lion.

The lion is the beast of the title. In the film’s opening moments, we watch poachers massacre its pride, sending it into a frenzy. The poachers can’t finish the job and flee. So when Idris Elba’s Dr. Nate Samuels shows up in South Africa with his two teenage daughters, Mer (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries), for a safari with his oldest friend, Martin (Sharlto Copley), he unknowingly becomes prey to the lion during its frenzied killing spree.

Nate is attempting to reconnect with his daughters in the wake of their mother’s death. He had separated from her before her illness, so he’s trying to erase a sense of guilt and properly heal by going back to South Africa, her homeland. The film’s first 20 minutes or so introduce us to the characters, establish their frayed relationships, and invest us in their survival. Essentially, if we want to see them heal their family unit, they’ll have to survive the upcoming night from hell.

But nothing is belaboured. Writer Ryan Engle, working from a story by Jaime Primak Sullivan, conveys essential info in brief exchanges between the characters. Little moments such as Mer correcting Martin when he calls her Meredith (her full name which she no longer uses) or Nate already being on his second or third whisky before even mentioning his dead wife to his daughters tells us a lot about these characters without protracted monologues or shouting matches. Although, you do get a drunken late night chat between Nate and Martin that lays out his emotional stakes.

Elba is particularly captivating in the lead. He approaches the physicality of the role as a matter of fact, stitching up wounds and fending off claws with the same utter credibility. The film’s emotional moments land only because Elba downplays the hysteria of each sequence, trying to stay cool for his daughters’ sake, knowing (as doctors do) that you have to stay calm to put a plan into motion. It’s a far better performance than many you get in late summer B-movies.

Once the table is set, we head into the bush of the Mopani Reserve (real life Greater Kruger National Park in the northeast) and things quickly go south. Along the way, Kormákur and Engle dole out information that’ll become essential later: an abandoned school is just outside the park; there’s a lion pride that hangs out on the rocks; Martin is taking them to a part of the park where tourists don’t go. After an ill-advised stop, the lion attacks the vehicle and Nate has to do everything he can to protect his daughters and get out alive.

Kormákur, who’s made some underrated survival thrillers (Everest chief among them), doesn’t complicate his visual approach in Beast. He favours long, roaming steadicam shots that follow the characters and situate them in the real natural environment. The approach makes it seem like we’re following the characters on a bush walk, a part of their safari party, and, thus, prey to the lion as well. As for the lion, it’s a nasty beast, and a surprisingly credible CGI creation. While CGI will never look as good as the real thing, the choice to go the digital route circumvents the moral issues of manipulating real lions and the dangers of getting them to pretend to kill people in front of a camera. (As Nope teaches us, animals aren’t always good at playing pretend, especially predators).

The film’s clear anti-poaching stance absolves the lion of being truly evil in Beast—it’s just an animal that’s gone nuts due to human brutality, not evil incarnate nor truly a character here—even if such moralizing is useless to the characters trying to survive its attacks. There’s a brute reality to the film’s scenario, which is that you may have to do things you don’t like to stay alive when confronted with death. Which leads to Nate trying to bargain with poachers and climb into snake-infested trees to try to get his family out alive. A lion may be a beautiful creature, but when it’s trying to kill you, it’s you or it.

You never really doubt the film’s resolution, but that doesn’t matter, as Beast is all about delivering on what’s promised, which is tense moments of survival and action in the beautiful African bush. That it also offers another testament to Idris Elba’s star power and talent as a performer is an extra reason to appreciate what a solid genre film it is.

7 out of 10

Beast (2022, USA)

Directed by Baltasar Kormákur; written by Ryan Engle, based on a story by Jaime Primak Sullivan; starring Idris Elba, Iyana Halley, Leah Sava Jeffries, Sharlto Copley.

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