Beast clip featuring Jessie Buckley, Johnny Flynn shows danger of keeping darkness inside
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At first, director Michael Pearce’s feature-length debut Beast appears to be a star-crossed love story between young outcasts Moll (Jessie Buckley) and Pascal (Johnny Flynn), who strain against the deep social conservatism of their hometown on the British isle of Jersey. As this exclusive clip from the film shows, Moll feels even more hemmed in by her strict family given a violent incident from her youth.
“Her skin is very thin and raw,” Buckley tells EW. “I never see her as someone who’s vulnerable, but she’s somebody who can be or has been making herself invisible because she’s scared of the power simmering underneath her.”
Moll soon becomes very visible, however, when Pascal becomes a prime suspect in a nasty murder. The biggest mystery isn’t even whether he’s guilty, but what kind of darkness inside Moll causes her to find him attractive — and, perhaps, what darkness in Jersey keeps producing beasts.
“We all have the ability to be dangerous and do things which are morally wrong. That beastliness is part of us, but the world you’re living in can make that louder,” Buckley says. “Moll’s in Jersey, and Jersey is a really interesting place. It’s this lone-standing island in between Britain and France. It’s an outcast in its own life. It’s got this very elemental landscape, a rugged natural landscape. Yet there’s a hugely conservative mindset where someone in the government pays somebody to measure the height of hedges. There’s a sheen across the island, yet even within that there are all these diffuse bunkers from World War II. That ‘underground-ness’ kind of infiltrates the whole film. The mother’s beastly and made Moll put a sheen over her own beastliness, which she acted out on when she was 13 and since then has been trying to atone and suppress that pain that she’s scared of. I suppose for Pascal, it’s something he acknowledges and isn’t afraid of.”
Watch the full clip above. Beast hits theaters on Friday.
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