“Immaculately composed yet skittish, edgy and surprising, this impressive debut by writer-director Michael Pearce emanates a chill that will have you hugging your sides. In the sense that there’s a serial killer at large in it, it’s a thriller, but Beast takes more of its cues from fairytales, throwing in moments of gothic horror and the odd dead bunny along the way. Just when you think you’ve got it pinned down, it hairpins off in a new direction.
“At its heart is Jessie Buckley’s prim Moll, a twenty-something living on the U.K. island of Jersey, where she's atoning for a past mistake that her controlling mom (Geraldine James) holds over her. Local wrong ’un Pascal (Johnny Flynn) offers an escape and a whiff of danger, but is he actually the killer?
“Satisfyingly, there’s much more here than a simple whodunnit.”
- Time Out
"When a scruffy, mud-flecked boy tenderly takes your hand and says, 'You’re wounded, I can fix that,' who wouldn’t want to believe him? If you’ve been derided and controlled by a cold mother, made to feel wicked and different all your life, nothing is going to stop you from falling in love with that boy, even though he carries a rifle and girls have been disappearing from your small seaside town. Such a twisted romance is the black beating heart of Beast, a tightly wound mystery with a grisly dilemma at its core. How far would you delude yourself for love, for the feeling of being seen, for the intoxicating smell of a person?" - Indiewire