93 min | R | August 19, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Idris Elba takes his daughters to a South African game reserve. A rogue lion turns the trip into a fight for survival. The lion is more developed than the people running from it.
Nate Samuels brings his two teenage daughters to a South African game reserve where their late mother grew up. He is a widower and a doctor who works in cities and feels like a stranger in the wild. A male lion has watched poachers slaughter its pride. Now it hunts every human it finds. Baltasar Kormákur builds the film around one idea. A grieving father with no survival skills must protect his children from a predator that wants them dead.
Idris Elba plays Nate as a man whose competence ends at the edge of a hospital. He is strong and useless at the same time. Elba sells the panic of a father who can stitch a wound but cannot read the bush. Sharlto Copley plays Martin Battles, the reserve manager who knew the family and treats the lions like neighbors. Copley gives the film its only character with a real relationship to the land. Iyana Halley and Leah Sava Jeffries play the daughters as frightened kids, and the script gives them grief to carry but little to do beyond scream and hide.
Kormákur and screenwriter Ryan Engle, working from a story by Jaime Primak Sullivan, stage the action in long unbroken takes. Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot keeps the camera circling the family inside the vehicle and out on the grass. The single-take approach traps you in the space with them. It also exposes every seam in the digital lion, which moves with weight in wide shots and turns rubbery in close attack. The savanna at dusk looks beautiful. The animal chasing through it does not always look like it occupies the same frame.
Beast knows exactly what it is and refuses to be anything more. It is a man against an animal in ninety minutes of chases and standoffs. The survival mechanics work and the lion attacks land with force. The film never invests in the family beyond the broadest strokes of loss and estrangement, so the danger registers as spectacle rather than dread. You watch Idris Elba punch a lion. Then you forget it.