Beast Beast (2021)

Glamour and Magazines

At a glance, Danny Madden’s Beast Beast seems like a remake of Elephant, with ripped-from-the-newsfeed aesthetics that bring it up to date from Gus Van Sant’s 2003 high-school-shooting drama. Once again, we’re faced with a disaffected loner whose fascination with guns results in tragedy. Once again, we’re met with the shock of carefree teenage lives being snuffed out in dramatically spectacular fashion, leaving us to question the line between overzealous advocacy and exploitation.

Look deeper, though, and you’ll notice that, compared to the earlier film’s millennial subjects, Madden’s Gen Z kids might as well be Martians—even though there are less than two decades between them.

Van Sant’s cast, shooters and victims alike, were predominantly white and as binary in their sexuality as in their technology. Madden’s teens are a crayon box of races, genders, and perspectives, and are either so enamored with social media, or with becoming influencers themselves, that they easily forget their vulnerability in very real, very hazardous situations. If Elephant was a reaction to the 1999 Columbine massacre, Beast Beast is a summation of 2015 through the present day: a span of years marked by social and political unrest; mass psychosis as ushered in by devices we used to just make calls on; and the ripple effects of that horrific morning in Littleton, Colorado.

There are two key differences between the films, which make one a bleak time-capsule novelty and the other a surprisingly nuanced and hopeful look at the horrors it displays.

The first difference is time. Elephant was essentially a day-in-the-life dramatization. Beast Beast takes place over several months, end-to-end. And even though some of that time gets condensed in ways that are extremely unhelpful to the themes Madden wants to promote, the pacing here is mostly remarkable.

The other difference, so related to time that it might as well be the same thing, is omniscience. Beast Beast is one of the least subjective films I’ve seen in a long time. And while Madden and company were surely aiming to draw us into these characters’ lives, it is the distance of third-party box seats that allows us to grasp the full tragedy of their decisions—and to wonder about other tragedies that might have awaited them had their lives not been interrupted.

We meet Krista (Shirley Chen), an outgoing Drama kid who makes up for her lack of a home life by cultivating a community of like-spirited performers at school. She takes a liking to Nito (Jose Angeles), the new kid whose locker is right below hers. He’s the mysterious skateboarder of few words with a winning smile that’s just visible behind his shaggy black hair.

Nito’s a performer, too, as evidenced by the dozens of parkour videos on his YouTube channel. He does tricks in skate parks, park parks, and shopping malls, and his talents draw the attention of a group of stoners led by Yoni (Daniel Rashid). Before you can say “bad influence”, Nito is fighting at a party, smoking dope in the back seat on the way to get liquor (another member of the pack is an embittered 21-year-old wage slave), and using his urban ninja moves to steal random things from stores.

We also meet Adam (Will Madden, the director’s younger brother), who is a few years out of high school and still living at home with his upper-middle-class parents. It’s easy to think of Adam as a stock character: the scrawny, gun-obsessed caucasian who probably wants to “take his country back” or some other such nonsense. Fortunately, for anyone not of the liberal persuasion who might wander into this film, the Maddens present a pretty well-rounded character as the “villain”—while simultaneously adding some not-so-flattering dimensions to the students he will inevitably collide with.

I don’t want to focus on how these paths intersect (there should be some reason for you to actually check out the movie, after all). I’m much more interested in Beast Beast’s true bad guy. Yes, it’s easy (and, in many ways, absolutely correct) to say that the person wielding an AR-15 against unarmed kids should be condemned. But the question has to be asked: why were those kids where they were, when they were? Further, why did Adam have that massive gun collection?

The answer may go back to the media frenzy surrounding Columbine. Twenty-two years on, a new generation of high school kids is saddled with a broken economy, disillusioned and utterly checked-out parents, and a ubiquitous outlet for escapism and self-promotion that can make the first two problems seem not so bad.

Adam funnels his lack of career ambition into becoming a YouTube star, figuring he can turn his love of weaponry into a viable source of income the way others do with political commentary, makeup tutorials, or movie reviews (and, yes, gun videos). Of course, he’s competing with approximately two billion other people who have the same dream, and it shows in his channel’s utter lack of traction.

Likewise, Nito seems like a nice kid who loves pulling off harmless public feats for the camera. And the edgiest thing he does with good-girl Krista is sneak into a neighbor’s swimming pool after dark. But he’s got a real mean streak in him that only we on the other side of the fourth wall are privy to—which makes the film’s latter third feel more unfortunate than heartbreaking. That is to say (and I’m circling a spoiler on the tips of my tippy-toes) Nito and Krista’s relationship may have (ahem) dodged a bullet.

i could have done without the rushed Third Act revenge plot, whose machinations made Beast Beast temporarily feel more like a Capital-M-Movie than the comparatively realistic scenes leading up to it. But Madden redeems himself in the closing moments as characters struggle to move on—some in the embrace of community; others in the anonymous, fickle gaze of a screen that promises community but offers only judgment.

In the end, the brilliance of Beast Beast is that it’s really nothing like Elephant at all. The giant weapon on the poster and the fact that it involves high school kids might lure some people into thinking it’s another Hollywood Liberal treatise on gun violence. But this is really an apt companion to The Social Dilemma, a dramatization of how crumbling families, malleable values, and identities propped up by digital validation can create an increasingly trigger-happy society.

Listen to Ian’s conversation with Beast Beast writer/director Danny Madden and Executive Producer Jim Cummings!