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The Beast

Play trailer Poster for The Beast 1975 1h 33m Drama Fantasy Play Trailer Watchlist
Watchlist Tomatometer Popcornmeter
68% Tomatometer 22 Reviews 51% Popcornmeter 1,000+ Ratings
A wealthy woman finds her fiancé dead after dreaming of an erotic encounter with a strange creature.

Critics Reviews

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Carson Lund Slant Magazine 11/03/2021
Accuse Walerian Borowczyk of perpetrating a pervy male gaze, but never accuse him of repressing anything. Go to Full Review
Peter Bradshaw Guardian 12/03/2014
It's ridiculous; it's tacky; it's pretentious - but it's touched with something comically sublime. Go to Full Review
Kim Newman Empire Magazine 12/03/2014
3/5
More charming than arousing, and solemnly silly. Go to Full Review
Luis Fernando Galván En Filme 08/21/2020
3/5
The director's meticulous work - the delightfully baroque music, for example - gives the erotic and dream sequences an undeniable artistic value. [Full review in Spanish] Go to Full Review
Jeremy Carr MUBI 05/23/2019
As a keen provocateur and multitalented artist, Borowczyk knew how to be sensational, and The Beast, his best film, is an appropriately surreal and dazzling mixture of farcical humor and uninhibited sensuality, all with the logic of perpetual reverie. Go to Full Review
Total Film Staff Total Film 02/07/2019
2/5
Seemingly intended as a Buñuelian farce, the pitiful animal effects and erotic scenes instead provoke derision. Go to Full Review
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Audience Reviews

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Chris V May 25 Even as open minded as I am, this was not interesting or good. The plot could be written on the back of a match book, the acting is amateurish and visually there is nothing original here. See more Courtney K @c0urtn3y 08/31/2024 started out boring & then eventually turned into a badly acted low budget porno. See more 08/11/2021 The year is 2021 and the world is being taken by a neo-conservative movement. Moralists mushroom everywhere and they go around pointing their fingers in condemnation of the sexuality of others. On the other extreme, the internet has destroyed pornography as art, reducing it to short clips, a sea of debris aimed at triggering immediate gratification in the mind of its viewers akin to alcohol shots. In this context, it was refreshing to see an old-style erotic movie. This is a tale of a cursed family, a ruined house of french nobles carrying a dark secret, expecting to save their line through an arranged marriage with an English family. The plot is very well written and it grabs the viewer's attention until the end. The erotic sequences are exquisitely made, they are art in its purest form - in particular the dream sequence of the garden accompanied with the sound of Scarlatti in the background; they trigger an emotional response but they are not in any way obscene. It is like watching a renaissance or impressionist painting of nude women. In my view, the combination between the set of a french chateau and the sound of Scarlatti's harpsichord in the background is simply perfect. It also provokes the viewer by subtlety exposing him/ to the hypocrisy of those with high morals. In short, if you want to return to the world of old cinema and watch erotism as an art form (which is quite different from pornography), this is a very good choice. It has all the ingredients. See more 07/22/2020 Packed with humor, style, and enough transgressive imagery to choke a horse, Walerian Borowczyk's carnal faery tale successfully exploits the pleasures of lowbrow European art. See more 04/27/2017 There's an identifiable line between using extreme content for social commentary and using extreme for the sake of having it there. The Beast crosses that line many times over. Any sort of social commentary or point that the movie may have is buried so far beneath the incessant sequences of grotesque, gross, and repulsive imagery that serves no other purpose than to shock the audience. A waste of a movie and an even bigger waste of time. See more 08/29/2016 1975. Banni pendant 30 ans pour cause de scènes de bestialité! Disponible sur netflix! Si on a l'esprit ouvert, ce film peut facilement devenir un excellent divertissement... campy à souhait! See more Read all reviews
The Beast

My Rating

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Movie Info

Synopsis A wealthy woman finds her fiancé dead after dreaming of an erotic encounter with a strange creature.
Director
Walerian Borowczyk
Producer
Anatole Dauman
Screenwriter
Walerian Borowczyk
Genre
Drama, Fantasy
Original Language
Canadian French
Release Date (Streaming)
Apr 4, 2017
Runtime
1h 33m