Forget Bergerac . . . this vision of Jersey is a nightmare
Beast (15A) Verdict: Tense and atmospheric
THE so-called Beast of Jersey was a serial sex attacker and paedophile who terrorised the island throughout the 1960s.
He was finally caught in 1971, convicted on 13 counts of rape and assault, and sentenced to 30 years in jail. He turned out to be an outwardly respectable, 46-year-old builder and handyman called Edward Paisnel, who had played Father Christmas at a children’s home.
This film, a moody psychological thriller, is loosely inspired by Paisnel’s story. Writer-director Michael Pearce, making an impressively assured debut feature, grew up on Jersey in the 1980s when Paisnel’s appalling crimes still loomed large in the collective memory. Beast owes a good deal of its power to the casting of Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn as the main protagonists.
Buckley in particular, so luminously excellent as Marya in the BBC’s 2016 production of War And Peace, gives a really compelling performance as Moll, a troubled young woman whose family regard her as emotionally vulnerable for reasons that take a while to emerge.
Moll lives with her parents in an affluent part of the island. They are stalwarts of the golf club, and the choral society is run by her mother, Hilary, played by Geraldine James as a tightlipped,
controlling bully. Moll feels eclipsed by her virtuous, married sister, pregnant with twins, and condescending brother. She is faintly repelled by the man her family consider a perfect match, a police detective.
Instead, she falls for Pascal (Flynn), a rascally poacher not unknown to the police, whose enigmatic charm brings gusts of fresh air into her repressed life. She first encounters him on a beach, where he chases away a man seemingly about to assault her.
It’s a timely intervention, not least because someone has been raping and murdering young women. There have been four victims and Pascal becomes a suspect, investigated by the very detective who still carries a torch for
Moll. Is Pascal, the rascal, also a serial killer? There is certainly an aura of danger around him, which is what so appeals to Moll.
Moreover, they are both outsiders, in their different ways. It’s easy to understand their chemistry, and to appreciate the irony in Moll’s job as a coachtrip tour guide.
She spends her days cheerfully pointing out picture-postcard sights under wide skies, while finding her middleclass existence on the island insufferably claustrophobic.
Beast isn’t just a tense thriller, it’s also a character study of a very unhappy young woman. And beyond that, it’s a portrait of a community riven with snobbery and judgmentalism. This offers a useful insight to those of us whose perception of Jersey is shaped pretty much entirely by episodes of the TV series Bergerac. As I dimly recall, even John Nettles character had his demons but they were nothing compared with those skulking here.
With the help of a brooding score, Pearce sustains a sense of menace and foreboding, which unhelpfully, sometimes veers a little close to gothic melodrama.
And the characterisations of Moll and Pascal are so strong that those of Moll’s family, and especially her ghastly mother, can seem a little bit flimsy by comparison. But this is nonetheless a gripping and well-told story, and by any measure a hugely promising debut.