The Beast (dir. Bertrand Bonello, 2024)

The Beast is a film of inhabitation. Its sectioned, temporally expansive narrative strands avoid the cosmic gimmick of the Wachowskis Cloud Atlas. Anchored instead in a space that updates and changes the felt and material markers of historical and geographical time while keeping something constant across all of it: the pain of authentic feeling, and the way wrongness shifts things askew.

It is the first contemporary film I have seen doing something genuinely new.