Beast (2022)

Beast arrives with the confidence of a film that knows precisely what it is: a lean arrangement in which Idris Elba, a widowed father, and two teenage daughters are stalked across a South African game reserve by a lion with a grudge. Baltasar Kormakur directs with the efficiency of a man who has studied the Jaws manual and concluded that the manual is sufficient. The lion is large. The car is small. The suspense is competent. There is little room for anything else, and the film seems aware that anything else would only slow the running.

The cast is predominantly Black, a fact the film treats as unremarkable, which is its own quiet virtue. Elba's Nate is a doctor grieving a wife lost to cancer, and his daughters, Meredith and Norah, are given more to do than scream: one drags a wounded biologist to safety, the other fires a tranquilizer dart into the beast's flank. These are survival-thriller beats, standard issue, not a thesis. The setting brings a Tsonga community and a wildlife biologist with strong feelings about poachers, and the film gestures at the notion that hunters ravaged the animal kingdom and are now paying for it. The gesture is brief. The lion does not deliver a monologue about conservation.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No subplot reaches for a same-sex pairing. No character pauses to interrogate the body. Nobody is revealed to be neurodivergent, and history is left unrevised. The poachers are villains because they are criminals, not because they are capitalists, and the film has no interest in redistributing their wealth. The remainder is a chase, executed with a straight face and a decent roar. The cultural accounting is modest, the entertainment value is real, and the whole thing is over before it can pretend to be about anything larger. There are worse ways to spend an evening, and few simpler ones.