Michael Pearce (2017)
We’ve had two nice holidays in Guernsey in recent years and at first I was tempted by The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, though worried about operating a double standard (see third paragraph of Call Me by Your Name review). I only needed to watch the trailer a few times to decide to give this heartwarmer a miss. I’ve not been to Jersey but the trailer for the psychological thriller Beast was also deterrent. It suggested a different kind of gruesome film and I wasn’t intending going, even with plenty of space in the diary just at present. (This year’s post-awards season lull has lasted longer than usual.) Then I saw and liked Beast‘s lead actress, Jessie Buckley, on television in The Woman in White. Then I read a New Yorker review in which Anthony Lane seemed to say the film was worth seeing just for Buckley. I try not to choose things on the strength of what others say but Lane’s piece made the difference.
In Beast a serial killer is at work on Jersey. Three teenagers or young women have already died. A fourth goes missing. At the start, the writer-director Michael Pearce cuts from the victims’ hillside memorials to a birthday party in the large garden of a big house. The birthday girl is Moll Huntford (Buckley), though ‘girl’ is misleading: we can make out from a sign in a window of the house that Moll is twenty-seven today. She’s only briefly the star of the show. Her sister Polly (Shannon Tarbet), addressing the party guests, starts with a toast to Moll but quickly turns to the upstaging announcement that she and her airline pilot fiancé (Morgan Best) are expecting twins. The sisters’ mother Hilary (Geraldine James), who speaks to Moll as if she were a dim and recalcitrant ten-year-old, promptly instructs her to get champagne to celebrate Polly’s happy news. (Moll’s almost puzzled reaction to the order implies that her birthday party had been making do with cheaper bubbles.)
As far as we see, Moll, who still lives at home, never manages to deliver the champagne. In the kitchen, she gets herself a drink. Startled by a dog’s bark, she drops and breaks the glass, then pushes fragments of it into the palm of her hand. Later in the evening, she slips away from the party unnoticed, goes to a club and spends hours dancing with Leigh (Charley Palmer Rothwell). It seems they don’t get any closer than dancing during the night; on a beach early next morning, when Leigh tries it on with her, Moll tries unavailingly to push him away. A third party arrives on cue, fires a shotgun into the ground and sends Leigh packing. Moll’s saviour is Pascal Renouf (Johnny Flynn) and he gives her a lift back home. They’re stopped at a police checkpoint on the way. Pascal swiftly covers the rabbits he’s been out shooting; an officer reminds him he should be wearing a seatbelt then lets him drive on. Both details have later significance in Beast, which tells the story of the relationship that develops between Moll and Pascal, who becomes a prime suspect for the murders taking place.
It’s soon clear the film’s title may have more than the killer in mind. In an early shot, Moll looks in a mirror and notices a hair growing on her throat. At her birthday party, she receives a gift from sweaty, creepy admirer and police detective Clifford (Trystan Gravelle). If looks could kill, Moll’s mother would have a string of homicides to her name. Michael Pearce, whose first feature this is, is from Jersey. He and the cinematographer Benjamin Kracun show the beauty and power of the land-and-seascape to great advantage but Pearce is less keen on his fellow Jersey natives. As well as domineering Hilary and shallow, selfish Polly, Moll’s family includes Harrison (Oliver Maltman), her porcine prat of a brother. The clan’s only tolerable members are Harrison’s subdued adolescent daughter Jade (Hattie Gotobed) and Moll’s father (Tim Woodward), who has dementia. Moll is required by Hilary to help look after both these two, as well as do other domestic chores and hold down a part-time job. (Biological daughter and mother they may be but the dynamic between them is that of Cinderella and the wicked stepmother.)
At a local fete, things get violent when Moll and Pascal intervene to stop a couple of racists from beating up Nuno (Tyrone Lopez), an immigrant worker whom they naturally suspect of killing the girls. Moll asks Pascal, a handyman as well as a poacher, to do odd jobs at the family home (an assignment that goes oddly uncontested by Hilary). At the first of two awkward meals with the family, Pascal, talking with his mouth full, claims to be descended from Norman aristocrats and jokes that the Huntfords are ‘on my land’. Their disapproval of this unkempt young man – ‘You can smell him a mile off’, according to Hilary – is an expression of snobbish prejudice as much as of suspicion that he’s a murderer. At the second awkward meal – lunch at the golf club – Pascal offends against house rules by wearing jeans. It’s a fine moment, thanks in large part to Jessie Buckley’s calm delivery, when Moll proposes a toast at this gathering: ‘To my family – for everything you’ve done for me … I forgive you’. It’s a letdown when Hilary conventionally bangs the table in response and thunders ‘Get out!’, when Moll, before she and Pascal take their leave, goes on the golf course and starts hacking divots out of the greens.
Michael Pearce has given the subordinate characters only one or two traits each. Anxious for more, the actors overdo things yet their vigour and camera close-ups that underline their unloveliness make these people thoroughly hateful. You soon feel that, for Moll, anything must be better than being stuck in the world she has but it’s only in the climax that you realise just how strongly you feel this. After a crisis in their relationship, Moll tells Pascal that she wants not only to be with him but also for him to know she knows he’s the serial killer. Her family’s ghastliness and the Jersey social set-up that Pearce presents modify the subversive impact of her choosing to live with a homicidal maniac – Pascal still seems a preferable alternative to Hilary and Harrison. By this stage, we know more of Moll’s troubled past and why she sees herself and Pascal as made for each other. At the age of thirteen, Moll stabbed a schoolmate with a pair of scissors and scarred her face. This was, Moll first tells Pascal, a desperate reaction to bullying at school, virtually an act of self-defence. She later admits that she meant to harm the girl. At the start, Moll removed the hair she saw on her throat, wincing slightly as she did so. Dressing for her climactic conversation with Pascal, she spots another hair in the same place. This time it remains.
The mechanical attempt to turn Moll and Pascal into vicious soulmates is dramatically weightless and exposes the shallowness of Michael Pearce’s script. That the film is not remotely a police procedural isn’t a problem in itself: what is a problem is that the occasional bits of conventional crime storytelling are weak. A scene between Moll, being questioned under caution about Pascal, and a witchy-looking detective (Olwen Fouéré) is so otherwise perfunctory that Pearce tries to create tension by having the lights in the interview room fail. When Clifford tells Moll that Pascal is innocent and another man is in custody for the murders, it’s obvious as soon as he’s named as Nuno that the police must have made a mistake – revealing their own racism into the bargain.
Pearce builds up grim atmosphere and delivers some nasty effects but is too preoccupied with doing so. (The soundtrack, with a surfeit of whooshing noises and ominous crescendos in Jim Williams’s music, follows suit.) Moll unexpectedly attends the funeral service for the fourth murder victim, resulting in more argy-bargy with Stuart (Barry Aird), one of the men who assaulted Nuno at the fete. Later, she goes into a shop owned by Sophie (Joanna Croll), the scissors victim from school, who throws a screaming fit. Why does Moll pay these visits? The answer seems to be – literally – to make a scene. Pascal takes Moll into the woods and pressures her into shooting a rabbit. When her shot wounds but fails to kill it, she summons up the nerve to end the creature’s agony. It’s a fair bet in any film in which a character is reluctantly introduced to killing halfway through that they’ll end up dispatching the introducer and this is just what happens in Beast. The road crash in the final scene solves the problem of the couple’s future together and enables the heroine, as she ends the life of the seriously injured Pascal, to realise her lethality.
Even if we’ve forgotten by now (as I had), many of us first saw Jessie Buckley in the 2008 BBC talent show I’d Do Anything, a competition for an unknown to play Nancy in a new West End production of Oliver! Buckley, the eventual runner-up to Jodie Prenger, has come a way since then. The latest television adaptation of The Woman in White wasn’t great (and featured some abominable acting from Dougray Scott and Charles Dance) but Buckley was the best thing in it. Her vivid sociability in the first episode stayed in the memory when the going got tough for Marian Halcombe later on. With the help of costume, she suggested a lesbian personality definitely but subtly enough not to extrude from the framework of a Victorian work of fiction. Red-haired Jessie Buckley, while not exactly pretty, has that mysterious ability to appear plain or beautiful as the occasion demands. As Moll, she’s able too to portray, without strain, a nature both diffident and combustible. She’s touching in her early submissiveness to Hilary, alarming when she screams at the vile Stuart outside the church after the funeral service.
Like Buckley, Johnny Flynn steers clear of false histrionics and, physically suitable for the role, doesn’t overstress Pascal’s rough allure: the principals’ relationship is all the better for it. Flynn isn’t so good when Pascal is meant to be emoting strongly but he partners Buckley very effectively and has a terrific moment in the closing stages. As they sit at a restaurant table and Moll tells Pascal she knows what he’s done but still wants him, he closes his eyes for what seems a long time. When he opens those eyes, the look in them is frightening – just for a second, before the brutality in the look goes back inside Pascal. Flynn’s sustained underplaying reaps a rich dividend here.
Michael Pearce does well to give Moll a job as a guide on Jersey coach tours. The brief sequences on what Pascal calls ‘granny wagons’ provides Jessie Buckley with the opportunity to illustrate Moll’s unremarkable public persona, at the same time conveying the strain involved in maintaining it. (It makes symbolic sense that, in the last coach sequence, Moll tries but fails to prevent herself throwing up.) Yet Buckley’s qualities are ultimately a mixed blessing for Pearce. She doesn’t convince in the final scene – in Moll’s gory apotheosis as a femme fatale – because she’s too true an actress to bring off a horror cliché like this. In the finale to Beast, its chief asset confirms the film’s limitations.
15 May 2018
