Beast (Michael Pearce) [Archive]

Stay Puft

01-19-2019, 04:53 AM

I also saw this one opening weekend and did not like it at all.

Well made, sure, and well acted. It's the kind of thing where you go, okay, I can see the promise here. It's solid for a debut, let's say, in that sort of back-handed way. But the scripting strikes me as awfully poor, the kind of storytelling that is simultaneously too far enamored with its own mysteries and clumsy and heavy-handed. It withholds crucial information as long as it can but it's also hilariously transparent and telegraphs what it's doing every step of the way. So, you know, clearly a first-time work.

It's also loosely based on a true crime story, but it reduces the complexity of that real event to a series of genre and art-house clichés in such a way that it (inadvertently, I suppose, but who really fucking knows) justifies the mass hysteria that saw a community violently and irrationally pursue the wrong man. This thing twists itself into a knot, and by the end, I was just thankful it was over.