In Review: 'Monkey Man,' 'Girls State,' 'The Beast'

Dev Patel's directorial debut brings the action, a group of girls attempt to keep democracy alive, and the latest from Bertrand Brunello hops unnervingly through time in this week's new releases.

Monkey Man
Dir. Dev Patel
122 min.

With the money saved up through menial jobs and a role as a monkey-masked heel in a bare-knuckle boxing ring—he only gets paid in full if he bleeds enough—a man-with-no-name type who calls himself “Bobby,” played by co-writer/director Dev Patel, considers a wall of black-market guns in the ultra-violent action movie Monkey Man. He ultimately settles on a small revolver with a lot of punch, because he needs to infiltrate a small space, but the salesman, sniffing an opportunity, boasts that he has a gun just like Keanu Reeves used in John Wick. That’s Patel’s little wink to the audience that, yes, they’ve got the right idea about the relentless, one-man revenge story that’s about to unfold. And if there was any way to work eating a live octopus into Monkey Man, too, he’d probably nod to Oldboy while he was at it. 

As grindingly familiar as Patel’s directorial debut seems at times, the blunt-force political populism that informs the film gives it a raw, righteous power. This is about a poor person, whose life has been scarred by injustice and tragedy, transforming himself into a folk avenger who slaughters his way through the corrupt and decadent elite. It’s pure class warfare, a broadside against the savage inequalities of Modi’s India, and Patel is making the savvy bet that Bobby’s quest is a crowd-pleasing fantasy. He has his personal reasons for revenge, just like John Wick or the nemeses in Oldboy or even Liam Neeson in Taken. But his agenda goes deep enough to create a new social order in Mumbai. 

There’s not much in the way of characterization here. Before he names himself “Bobby” after a brand of canned bleach, Patel plays a hard-luck scrapper who lost his mother and his home for reasons the film doles out slowly through flashbacks. At the top of Mumbai’s cultural food chain is a phony spiritual guru (Makarand Deshpande) who’s been gobbling up land from the underclass, along with Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar), who manages a high-end restaurant, club, and brothel, and Rana (Sikandar Kher), a police official who acts as the muscle for all of them. Bobby manages to score a job doing grunt work in Queenie’s kitchen, and then figures out how best to tear up the entire operation. 

Though Bobby survives his share of scrapes, to put it mildly, one appeal of Monkey Man—and of Patel, a wiry and determined fighter, but not an imposing one—is that he doesn’t seem invincible and even gets the worst of his first bout with the bigger Rana. In a way, the film feels like a continuation (or maybe a redo) of Patel’s arduous journey in The Green Knight, which gives Bobby the shine of a martyr as well as a hero, willing to give effort until the last drop of blood is wrung from his body. At 122 minutes, Monkey Man is absurdly overlong for a film that’s ultimately pretty straightforward and tedium sets in as the group melees start to blur together. On the other hand, no one said hacking through the rich was easy. — Scott Tobias

Monkey Man swings into theaters tonight.

Girls State
Dir. Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine
96 min.

It wouldn’t be accurate to call Girls State an entirely sunny portrait of the American Experiment as it’s about to be handed off to a new generation, but a heartwarming undercurrent runs through the film. Though it doesn’t always triumph, democracy has a pretty solid record when pitted against bullshit. A companion piece to Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s 2020 documentary Boys State, Girls State chronicles a session of Girls State, an annual gathering of civic-minded high school girls who are tasked with building a democratic government from scratch. Sponsored by the American Legion and held in every state, the Girls State and Boys State gatherings combine elements of a summer camp, a political convention, and a pressure cooker. The vision of the event that emerges from Moss and McBaine’s film is one of teens caught between the desire to create a new vision of the future and the instinct to mimic what they’ve seen work in politics all their lives.

But Girls State is not just Boys State Redux for several reasons, starting with the obvious. The events are separated by sex in every state except Hawaii and, assuming Girls State offers a representative sample, the experiences are not the same. This becomes increasingly evident over the course of the film as participants chafe against a dress code and a buddy system not required of their Boys State equivalents while unearthing other inequalities, like a much smaller budget. That Moss and McBaine chose a Missouri Girls State held on the same campus as that year’s Boys State makes these differences harder to ignore.

Girls State’s moment sets it apart even more profoundly. Shot in 2022, the annual event unfolds between the time the Dobbs decision leaked to the public and when it was confirmed by the Supreme Court. As the event opens, most participants appear shy about fully expressing their political leanings (not counting one girl wearing a “When I Die Don’t Let Me Vote Democrat” shirt), but the Dobbs leak all but makes this impossible. 

That’s true of everyone, including the five subjects that serve as Girls State’s focal points, a diverse bunch that includes Emily, a bubbly conservative who leads with her willingness to listen to others; Nisha, whose introverted nature would seem to make politics an uphill climb but who forms a close bond with one of her competitors for a Supreme Court position; and Faith, a small-town-conservative-turned-fervent progressive. Their selection serves as a cross-section of 2020s Midwest teendom but each girl is a compelling subject in her own right, and each of their stories takes unexpected turns, like a thwarted gubernatorial candidate who reinvents herself as a pot-stirring investigative reporter.

Over the course of Girls State, the initial chaos gives way to urgent concerns both specific to their situation—Why does Missouri’s governor show up for the Boys State’s election but not Girls State’s?—and of-the-moment concerns, many of them tied to Dobbs either directly or in the overarching question of what role the government should play in the private lives of its citizens. An urgent sense of their roles in shaping the future emerges after the pat empowerment slogans, unequal treatment and esprit de corps singalongs—the bullshit, in other words—fall away. Like its predecessor, Girls State is brisk and entertaining without ever feeling superficial. McBaine and Moss have a keen sense of what moments matter, both in the progression of the Girls State session and the talking-head interviews with their subjects. Whether the ability of its subjects to find common ground across political divisions is a sign of hope or a temporary state the realities of the world will compel them to leave remains an open question they’ll ultimately have to answer for themselves—and for the rest of us. —Keith Phipps

Girls State begins streaming on Apple TV+ tomorrow.

The Beast
Dir. Betrand Bonello
145 min.

Cloud Atlas. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Lost Highway. Minority Report. Body Double. 2046. It could be too many years of drumming up pairing ideas for The Next Picture Show podcast, but the experience of watching Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, a time-hopping pastiche of exhilarating scope, feels like listening to a great mixtape, with familiar tracks arranged into something new. Or maybe “new” isn’t quite the right word, because Bonello triggers so much déjà vu in how he fiddles with the circuitry in the cinephile brain, accessing memories to put his own twist on them. The classic example from Bonello’s previous work is a sequence in 2011’s House of Tolerance where an early 20th century Parisian brothel suddenly sways to The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin.” The emotional association forgives the anachronism. 

Inspired by the Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle, about a man crippled by his conviction that catastrophe would define his life, The Beast is a science fiction film that applies that fatalism to one woman across three different timelines: 1910, 2014, and 2044. Through all the timelines interact eventually, Bonello chooses 2044 as the pivot point for its protagonist, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), who has taken preliminary steps to “purify” her DNA, which functionally means wiping away the remnants of past lives that feed into her current unhappiness. Bonello is coy about what has happened to the world leading up to 2044, but it’s conspicuously underpopulated and Gabrielle has to wear a full mask over her face when walking outside. She’s also accompanied by an android (Saint Omer’s Guslagie Malanda) who guides her through the process. 

As Gabrielle settles into a memory pool that looks like mud bath filled with black tar, the film flashes back to 1910, when Gabrielle is a celebrated pianist in belle époque Paris before the Great Flood, which hangs over the section like the wave pool of Damocles. Though married to a stable, loving, respectable man, Gabrielle finds herself drawn to Louis (George MacKay), a mysterious young patron who inspires desire and fear in her at once, tied to a conviction that a terrible fate is shadowing her. In the 2014 timeline, Gabrielle is an aspiring actress and model who’s housesitting an enormous house of fishbowl transparency and Louis is a 30-year-old incel whose virulent misogyny is edging toward violence. Naturally, their lives intersect once more, and fear and desire again creep into play. 

Though all three timelines are compelling in different ways—in 2044, discos are themed by year, which is a pleasingly immersive experience in itself—the 2014 section, arriving about an hour into the film, gives The Beast most of its dramatic juice. McKay’s character is modeled after the Isla Vista killings perpetrated by Elliot Rodger the same year, with bits of Rodger’s manifesto trickling into the confessionals that lead up to his meeting with Gabrielle. But the combination of that threat and the premonitory dread of the entire film leads to a couple of absolutely terrifying setpieces where death and desire tiptoe along the razor’s edge. There’s an undeniably Lynchian edge to an online fortune teller who “sees” a presence around Gabrielle, but the fact that love binds Seydoux and MacKay on every timeline adds another layer to the familiar situation. 

Between the rhyming anthologized stories and the patchwork of references that Bonello uses to bring them together, The Beast can feel a little less than the sum of it considerable parts, mainly because the central theme, about whether a catastrophe-haunted life is worth living, can’t muster the power of an influence like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But Bonello’s filmmaking bravado, combined with Seydoux’s cohesive and mesmerizing performance in all three roles, makes The Beast thrillingly unpredictable, because there’s no telling what source he’ll cull from next. (There are even clips from Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers worked in here.) You never know when it’ll turn swooningly romantic or when it’ll freak you the hell out. — Scott Tobias

The Beast opens in limited release tomorrow before expanding.