Roar action: safari-gone-wrong thriller ‘Beast’ gets a lot right
Idris Elba faces off against a vengeful rogue lion in a family survival thriller, filmed in South Africa, that’s less cringey than you’d think. By
Recently widowed Dr Nate Daniels (Idris Elba) is returning to South Africa with his two teenage daughters to visit the place where he met their mother – a game reserve managed by his old friend Martin (Sharlto Copley).
While out on a game drive, Martin and the family are pursued by an enormous human-hunting lion and find themselves scrambling to survive a very different kind of exciting bonding vacation from what they’d had in mind.
A South African hearing this might grimace in anticipation of generalisations about Africa, clunky CGI and a simple, messy plot that just barely links the action sequences it’s built around. Why? Because almost the exact same film was released last year, and it was truly awful. The trailer alone for Endangered Species showcases just about everything that could fail in a safarigone-wrong thriller. Refreshingly, Beast turns out to be pretty much cringe-free.
Beast is a classic high-concept film. It’s premised on an easily communicated idea which tracks a “what if” question to its logical conclusion: what if an American family, stranded in the bush, was being stalked by a bloodthirsty lion?
Executive producer Jaime Primak Sullivan apparently pitched Beast to blockbuster producer Will Packer as “Cujo with a lion”, so it is inherently derivative. This quote from Packer shows why high-concept films often lack depth: “We had to figure out what the story was going to be, who the characters were, how we were going to make it all meld together, but the idea of a lion and a survival thriller got my juices flowing.”
The most crucial elements of the film – character development, plot cohesion, the entire story – are an afterthought. That doesn’t mean the film will fail in these areas – Beast succeeds in at least two of the three – but it does mean that the priority of the film is visceral entertainment rather than intellectual. Indeed, the jump-scares in
Beast are genuinely scary, appealing to a primal human fear, and the lion-based action is immersive and extreme – that’s what this kind of movie is all about.
Jaws famously didn’t reveal its giant predator for the bulk of the film to save money and because of problems with Bruce, the ridiculous mechanical shark (which only got four minutes of screen time). This created the tense anticipation that made it such a thrilling watch. Since then, movies with archetypal “monster” antagonists have often drawn out the reveal of the creature in the same way, but more often than not, the waiting is simply frustrating.
Beast, to its credit, avoids both of these genre-specific pitfalls: the lion is revealed in full as soon as the film begins, massacring a village and charging headlong into a safari vehicle. This is no rickety rubber shark’s head either; the giant cat is utterly, terrifyingly realistic despite being CGI-animated.
The sets, on the other hand, are real. Beast was filmed in South Africa – in Limpopo, Northern Cape and Cape Town. This allows for wide, sweeping shots of the bush that impart a sense of its vastness.
The set and costume design don’t feel like generic representations of Africa served to a none-the-wiser American audience. Martin’s house and the Venda village feel livedin and believable. Scattered in the sets are details that quietly foreshadow later plot points, even though most people might not notice them or even know what they were, such as the snares displayed in Martin’s house, often displayed by anti-poachers.
The family drama in the film is treated with more sincerity than one might expect from a blockbuster. Beast is firmly in the tradition of family survival thrillers, in which the immediate danger occurs in parallel with the group’s personal conflicts.
Dr Daniels blames himself as both a husband and a doctor for not spotting the signs of his wife’s cancer earlier. There’s a lot of tension between him and his eldest daughter, Meredith (Iyana Halley), who’s suffered too many of his broken promises and feels neglected. Meredith’s irritating passive aggression is only eased by her perceptive younger sister, Norah (a precocious Leah Jeffries), who defuses tension with her quirkiness and adorable cheeky banter.
Meredith is a vehicle for a trick played on the audience early in the film. As she walks into Martin’s house, she asks: “Did mom shoot some of these?” We can’t see what she’s referring to – possibly a wall of mounted animal heads? But, instead, it’s photographs, the best way to “shoot” game.
This little misdirection is a hint at the film’s stance on poaching. It’s strongly suggested that the lion has only become so aggressive as a reaction to poachers attacking its pride.
This detail is not to inspire compassion for the lion, but to mitigate the kind of fallout created by Jaws, which resulted in fear and misconceptions about sharks.
The anthropomorphising of the lion is farfetched. It behaves diabolically in ways lions don’t, returning over and over, attacking a vehicle, monitoring its wounded prey almost as if using it as bait for other humans.
We empathise with the people faced with defending themselves against a seemingly unstoppable threat, and yet this is in itself an analogy for the threat that lions and other animals face from humans. The lion is always seen from the perspective of the characters, furthering this role reversal.
The other “lesson” in the film is more cliché – the old fable of “nature strikes back”. Nature will strike back if we disrespect it, but with scorching heatwaves, rising sea levels and decreasing air quality, not giant hyper-intelligent, calculating apex predators. Beast perpetuates this idea simply because it sounds cool and puts the film on the right side of environmental politics.
Beast plays out much like you expect it to, delivering everything it promises and nothing else. If you want shivering suspense, adventure action and state-of-the-art animal visual effects, you’ll be pleased to receive all three with minimal cringe-worthy renditions of South Africa.
If you want more than that – an unpredictable script, a risky score or experimental cinematography – then don’t watch a movie about Idris Elba exchanging fisticuffs with a lion.