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.