The best sci-fi movie of 2024 so far is now available to stream at home

Holding an 87% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the film was only in cinemas a few months ago but has already come to streaming.

The Beast, an epic sci-fi movie from acclaimed French director Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama), is now streaming at home in the UK just weeks after its cinema release.

Available to watch on the service Mubi, and loosely based on the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle, the film begins in a 2044 version of Earth recovering from a human-caused global disaster.

This has led to artificial intelligence now controlling the world and deeming human emotions a threat.

Also in this future world, it has been discovered that humans’ strongest feelings are linked to events they experienced in their past lives and that people can rid themselves of such emotions through a machine that makes them relive these experiences.

In order to secure a job, a woman named Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux – also in Dune: Part Two, the other best sci-fi of 2024) volunteers for this process.

During this time, she meets a stranger named Louis (George MacKay – 1917) who she feels an immense connection with.

As she plunges into her past lives – one as pianist and doll maker in France in 1910 and another as a model in Los Angeles in 2014 – Gabrielle realises that she also knew Louis then.

George MacKay and Léa Seydoux in The Beast

Thought provoking, extremely funny in certain points but also deeply unsettling and emotional for much of its runtime, The Beast – which is told half in English, half in French – is stylish, unpredictable and wildly ambitious.

Featuring two of the best performances of the year from Seydoux and MacKay, the best brief descriptor for the tone of the movie is to imagine if David Lynch directed Cloud Atlas.

Holding an 87% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, you can read a sample of some of the glowing reviews, the film earned right here:

ABC News: “Bertrand Bonello’s exhilarating cinematic challenge stars a never-better Lea Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers across space and time who fight to embrace the beast of their raging emotions while artificial intelligence threatens to eradicate it.”

Chicago Reader: “It’s a textually dense, formally ambitious, and supremely engaging, genre-melding treatise on fear and love.”

The Guardian: “The Beast won’t be for everyone, but submit to its looping structure and beguiling dream logic, and this extremely loose adaptation of a novella by Henry James weaves a bewitching, if a trifle head-swimming spell.”

HeyUGuys: “This is a bold and visionary film, an innovative modern sci-fi that feels both fresh and original. It delves into generational trauma and female oppression, whilst exploring an array of modern issues such as alienation and toxic masculinity. A must-see.”

New York Times: “Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is an audacious interdimensional romance, techno-thriller and Los Angeles noir rolled up in one.”

The Beast is streaming on Mubi in Ireland and the UK right now: