Beast Beast review – insultingly shallow take on gun violence
Here’s another indie flick that mistakes handheld camera movements for emotional intimacy. Produced by Alec Baldwin, Danny Madden’s second feature has a host of characters and storylines that are just as empty and unfocused as the migraine-inducing cinematography. Revolving around of group of multi-ethnic Gen Z-ers in the American south, this message-heavy film tries hard to tackle urgent issues such as social media, familial conflicts and, above all, gun violence. The film only succeeds at peddling barely tolerable coming-of-age cliches.
The kids in Beast Beast hail from all walks of life. There is Krista (Shirley Chen), a spunky Asian theatre kid who blooms on stage yet wilts at home in the presence of her neglectful parents. She is charmed by Nito (Jose Angeles), a new Latino student from a much rougher side of town with a knack for skateboarding tricks. Looming over their sweet rendezvous is the quietly unsettling presence of Adam (Will
Madden), a white firearms “enthusiast” who is obsessed with making gun vlogs.
He rarely leaves his parents’ home and prefers stewing over malicious online comments.
As the first hour of the film lolls along, full of prickly yet mostly innocent adolescent incidents, but with a sense of malevolence lingering via a recurrent menacing musical interlude full of clanging noises. After all, the Chekhov gun is there and indeed, it unsurprisingly fires to bloody results in the third act. Without giving anything away, the film’s condemnation of gun violence is gratingly shallow, favouring melodramatic histrionics that produce iffy racial optics as brutality is repeatedly inflicted upon the nonwhite characters. Beast Beast also appears to have done zero research into how a community responds to these kind of tragedies or how the justice system even works. Clearly, the film cares more about checking off liberal talking points than lending its characters any real depth. Such simplistic posturing is, frankly, pretty insulting.
• Beast Beast is released on 30 April on digital platforms.