Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Danny Madden
Starring: Shirley Chen, Jose Angeles, Will Madden, Courtney Dietz, Daniel Rashid, Anissa Matlock
An expansion of an earlier short, writer/director Danny Madden's
feature debut Beast Beast owes much to the slacker cinema
of 1990s American indies. With its cast of teens and young
twentysomethings negotiating a suburban landscape, it recalls the films
of Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark. But with its
commentary on the added pressures of social media, it's very much a
movie of its time.
Madden's film interlinks the stories of three specific characters.
Krista (Shirley Chen) is a theatre geek, spending her evenings
rehearsing for an upcoming school play and uploading videos that
showcase her acting chops to the internet. Similarly obsessed with his
online image is her next door neighbour, 24-year-old Adam (the
director's brother, Will Madden), a gun obsessive who pours all
his time into a YouTube channel where he demonstrates weapons
techniques, much to the chagrin of his understandably worried parents. A
newcomer to this patch of suburbia is Nito (Jose Angeles), a
skateboarder and parkour enthusiast who despite not even owning a phone,
has managed to achieve what Krista and Adam crave – videos of him
performing acrobatics have racked up millions of views online.
Nito falls in with a gang of teenage criminals led by an older girl,
Lena (Anissa Matlock), a suburban Ma Barker who enlists his
physical skills – Nito is put to use climbing into stores at night and
breaking into homes. He also catches the eye of Krista, and when the two
collaborate on her latest performance project they quickly fall for one
another. Meanwhile, Adam is growing increasingly frustrated by his lack
of success in finding an online audience, something that will change
following a violent incident.
The storytelling principle of Chekhov's Gun states that if a gun is
introduced in a piece of drama, it must be fired at some later point in
the narrative. With an entire wall of Chekhov's pistols, shotguns and
assault rifles carefully arranged as the backdrop for his YouTube
tutorials, it's immediately obvious where Adam's particular plot-line is
headed. When it does indeed materialise in the final act, the aftermath
is a little hard to swallow and the movie rushes through a revenge plot
that probably needs an entire movie of its own to fully satisfy.
Up to that misjudged point, Beast Beast is one of the
more convincing portrayals of suburban teen ennui of recent times. The
lead trio are all excellent, particularly Madden as the tightly wound
Adam, whose golf caddy aesthetic conceals a powder keg about to hook up
with a lit match. As we watch him don fake smiles to record outros for
his videos before returning to glum uncertainty once the recording has
stopped, we're given a glimpse of how things might have turned out for
Patrick Bateman had he not landed a job on Wall Street.
The real find though is Angeles, whose parkour and skateboard skills
are simply breath-taking. So rare is it to see such physical action in
American movies that despite being a low-key indie drama,
Beast Beast has more thrilling action than any Marvel
superhero movie. Only Tom Cruise is using his body in this way in
American cinema, and watching Angeles leap through car windows and defy
gravity with his skateboard brought me back to my childhood watching
Jackie Chan with my jaw wide open.
It's Krista's story that binds all this together, which makes it all
the more odd that of the central trio, she's the one who feels the least
developed, despite some great work from Chen. Her obsession with acting
suggests she's putting on some sort of a mask, but we're given no real
clues as to the real Krista she might be hiding, or what she might be
using her acting to escape from (I've seen Asian-American critics bemoan
the film's lack of willingness to explore the particular pressures
placed on teens of that ethnic group by their parents).
Beast Beast doesn't quite coalesce as neatly as it might
like, but there's something affecting about its rough edges. Mining
three striking performances from his young leads and displaying a talent
for structuring a story to elicit the maximum build-up of tension,
Madden has marked himself as one to watch. How many views his own work
will rack up remains to be seen.
