Compelling tale of Guernsey’s dark side
Beast 15 cert, 107 min
The young woman caught up in the midst of Beast is called Moll, and it’s clear early on that she intends to live up to her name. As dawn breaks on a bleary night out, Moll is walking along the Jersey coast with a sleazebag she met in a club: he makes an advance, she resists, and he presses on until a stranger emerges from the dunes and levels a rifle at his head.
Her harasser scampers off and her saviour introduces himself. Pascal is not a gangster in the Clyde Barrow sense, perhaps, but obviously bad news. Yet Moll sees a possible future with him as his Parker, as she thinks of herself as bad news, too. In one way, they are a perfect match.
Three girls have recently been abducted, raped and murdered on the island by a killer who remains at large. Suspicion perhaps inevitably falls on Pascal, who fits the bill as a loner with a dark past. But as Moll falls in love, she sees the investigation as a vendetta against this charismatic outsider, even as the close-knit community begins to take his guilt as read. This relationship forms the core of Michael Pearce’s clammily compelling debut feature, which paints a very different picture of Channel Island life to that other film set in Guernsey involving books and potato peel pies. It is a suspenseful character study inspired in part by Edward Paisnel, the so-called “Beast of Jersey” who carried out a string of sex attacks on the island between 1960 and 1971. But it is pricklingly attuned to the bleak commonalities of all high-profile British crime cases: the tearful press conferences in village halls, the straggly lines of volunteers scouring scrubland for clues, the bouquets of dead flowers taped to telegraph poles and fence posts, and most of all the public hunger for answers.
It is also built around a terrific performance by Jessie Buckley, who burrows right under the skin of the damaged Moll, whose blank eyes and briar patch of auburn hair are almost certainly meant to evoke Maxine Carr, who furnished the Soham killer Ian Huntley with a false alibi. Johnny Flynn, meanwhile, plays Pascal with a Malcolm Mcdowell-like twinkle of threat, but also sympathy and warmth.
Beast is less concerned with the usual whodunit mechanics than the queasy climate of suspicion, and the way in which Moll responds to it by doubling down on her outsider status. Pascal clearly unlocks something in her that she has long kept buried. In a glorious sequence after the two first make love, Moll returns home and collapses on her mother’s pristine cream sofa, her legs spread in triumph, her clothes and skin streaked with mud. Pearce’s film might not leave you in quite the same state, but it taps into something wordless and wild.