Beast

Moll (Jessie Buckley) works as a tourist guide for a coach tour company on Jersey, where the film is set. She is desperately unhappy with both her job and her life in general. She still lives at home with her parents where she is under the thumb of her overbearing mother (Geraldine James), who has a low opinion of Moll compared with her other two children, her brother Harrison (Oliver Maltman) for whom Moll is expected to provide unlimited babysitting services and her sister Polly (Shannon Tarbet).

It is Polly who has the audacity to announce, at Moll’s own birthday party, that she is pregnant with twins. Heartily pissed off at being upstaged by her sister, Moll storms out of the party and ends up at the local night club. At the club she meets a young lad, who later attempts to force himself on her. She is rescued by Pascal (Johnny Flynn) who appears with a shotgun slung across his shoulder and frightens her suitor off. Pascal is a handyman come vagabond and seeing him as a bit of an outcast like herself, she is clearly quite taken with him.

Here Moll is, balancing the attentions of two strangers, while the whole island is being terrorised by a serial killer who has raped and killed several young girls. The latest victim being on the same night as her party. 

Unperturbed, and probably feeling he is the only person who seems to understand her, she starts a passionate relationship with him. She invites him to her home where she flaunts him in front of her family. Being the complete antithesis of her upper-middle class family, they are all horrified, her mother in particular and Pascal revels in the role of disapproved lover.

She continues their relationship even when told of his criminal record by Clifford (Trystan Gravelle), a young police officer who has his own eye on Moll. Inevitably Pascal is soon the chief suspect for the murders but Moll provides him with a false alibi, saying that they had danced all night at the club together.

To complicate things further, Moll has secrets of her own. When she was at school she stabbed another girl who was bullying her and this is partly the reason for her mother keeping her on a short leash, scared that if provoked she could do it again.

Everything comes to a head when the Moll and Pascal meet up at a beach side restaurant and the film delivers a clever final scene that beings the film to a hugely ambiguous conclusion. Leaving the audience to decide exactly what just happened and where their sympathies should lie.

This is a very smart film which constantly overturns your expectations of where it’s heading and of what type of film it is. Backed by excellent performances from Buckley and Flynn, it is utterly brilliant and possibly the best thing I've seen this year so far.

Mary Magdalene

‘Mary Magdalene’ is yet another retelling of the Jesus Christ story but this time using a new interpretation of the New Testament which does a demolition job on the wildly held assumption that Mary Magdalene was a mere prostitute. As an RE lesson, pretty much all the usual story is present and roughly correct. You know, the raising of Lazarus, Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, Judas’s betrayal and the Crucifixion. This time though Mary Magdalene seems to be Jesus’s right hand man, I mean woman, rather than Peter.

Mary M (Rooney Mara) rejects the expected norms of an arranged marriage and a future of prodigious childbearing for the want of something better to do with her life. Good girl. Her family are rather appalled at this ground breaking madness and promptly attempt to exorcise the demon within her. However it’s not a demon that has taken her but the unkempt bunch of blokes who turned up unannounced in her village. This ragamuffin group turn out to the disciples lead by a rather scruffy chap called Jesus (Joachim Phoenix). A man who seems to be keeping his alleged charisma well hidden. Nonetheless she elopes with this dozen or so blokes which perhaps understandably doesn’t go down that well with her father and brothers. They attempts to take her back but the disciples refuse to let her go. Which I didn’t think was very Christian of them.

So this retelling puts Mary M front and centre and seems to suggest that she knew what Jesus was on about better than the lads did. She becomes somewhat a teacher’s pet and starts following Jesus around like a lost sheep. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what everybody else does. The cameraman included which is why the film often drags so much. There are only so many lingering stares between the two of them you can take. Apparently Phoenix and Mara are an actual couple in real life, I just hope they have more chemistry at home and perhaps speak a bit louder to each other because at times here the dialogue is scarcely audible.

There are a few other, possibly contentious and confusing, plot changes. Judas (Tahar Rahim) doesn’t seem to betray Jesus but sort of just makes a mistake and no money changes hands. While Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) forgets to disown Jesus, not once let alone three times. 

It’s all a bit of a mess really but lets face it, no one really knows what went on out there in the desert in 33AD, but if it really was as dull as this then I doubt this bible thing would have gained as much traction as it has.