Dhe scary animal genre has produced few top-notch films. Just because of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” (1975), there is still hope of being well entertained with every new work in which particularly wild or particularly large creatures are after people will. There has been no lack of biodiversity in recent decades: all kinds of finned animals attacked people in water (“Piranha”, “Lake Placid”), a rabid dog besieged a family in the car (“Cujo”), and aggressive giant snakes (“Anaconda” ) and various oversized spiders (“Arachnophobia”) shocked the audience. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur is now adding a lion on a vendetta to this series in “Beast”.
The snarling of the big cat cuts through the darkness right at the beginning of the film. Hunters grope through the nocturnal savannah. One of the men shines his flashlight on a pride of lions gnawing on a zebra carcass. Shots from automatic weapons strike down the animals. The hunters are poachers, they hope to make big profits from the lions they kill. But in the bushes of the savannah the deep growling has not yet died down.
Idris Elba plays a doctor who knows nothing about all this when he lands in South Africa with his two daughters. He wants to show the girls where their deceased mother grew up. The trip to the remote nature reserve is also intended to help repair the family ties between father and daughters, which have been damaged by the sudden death of their mother. Upon arrival, the teenagers complain about the heat, the youngest complains about the lack of cell phone signal, but soon there are more serious problems. Visiting a village, Elba and an old friend who works as a biologist in the reserve discover horribly mutilated corpses. A very large animal attacked the men and women and left them there. The biologist briefly explains that a lion does not normally tend to such senseless cruelty (killing edible food without eating it). Then he follows a growl in the bush.
So far, so typical of the genre. Director Kormákur routinely uses what is to be expected: Builds up tension by not seeing the huge lion for a long time, only the growling in the distance and his bloody deeds tell of the animal’s terror. In some jump scares, the camera work in which something creepy jumps out of the box into the picture like a jack-in-jumping devil, he suddenly appears on the screen, impressively animated on the computer from mane to tassel. Unfortunately, the director’s and camera’s ideas don’t go far beyond such standard effects. Only one image sticks in my mind longer, stylized like a diorama in the natural history museum. Elba dives under a dead tree trunk in the black water of a river as the lion works its way through the branches, scenting it – and you hold your breath with him for a moment.
Kormákur may not be the ideal director for this British actor; Idris Elba’s performance doesn’t quite match the complexity of his depressed detective in BBC’s Luther, but he makes the most of the chilling material. Believably, he changes from the situation of the overwhelmed single parent to the combat mode of the experienced doctor. If you had to be stuck in the heat in a broken-down jeep with no radio contact while an extremely angry lion roamed around this tin can, then you wished for such competent companionship.
Of course, “Beast – Hunters without Mercy” is not just about the growling big cat. Alfred Hitchcock already knew that horror is always good for a metaphor. In “The Birds” a couple wants to get closer, but in so doing endangers the man’s family structure. Whenever sexual desire flares up, the animals attack. Their wildness symbolizes the fear of instinct and its consequences. Kormákur also tries not to look for the horror alone out in the savannah, it also sits deep in the members of his small family. Confronted with external difficulties, father and daughters have to face their inner conflicts. Angry lion speeds up family therapy. You yell at each other, pull yourself together and just have to survive the rest of the film. Anyone expecting a rollercoaster ride of terror will find themselves in the more harmless ghost train car, without any major ups and downs, but with a few entertaining spooky effects.
#Beast #cinema #beast #hunter