James Bond may have passed Idris Elba by – turning 50 today, he’s too old to play the role for three or four movies – but that doesn’t mean he can’t still be a man of action who has a great physical presence on screen. Baltasar Kormakur’s Beast showcases that perfectly. He’s not the beast of the title; that honour goes to a ferocious lion out for revenge. However, he could be, given how this American doctor calls on reserves of courage to protect his daughters from the rampaging creature on its own home ground.

The story is set in South Africa, the homeland of the ex-wife of Dr. Nate Samuels (Elba). Nate has brought his daughters Norah (Leah Jeffries) and Meredith (Ilyana Halley) to see it in the year or two after she passed from cancer. They’re staying with Nate’s old friend, Martin – played by our most visible South African actor, Sharlto Copley – who has a place on the savannah that’s overgrown with verdant plant life in every room. It would make for a great holiday, except that Mere – Meredith goes by Mere now – is constantly shooting daggers at her father, feeling like he failed her mother, and Mere’s impression of their father is already starting to poison the outlook of the younger and more loyal Norah.

Martin wants to show them the sights, and that naturally includes prides of lions, whose trust Martin has invested his time gaining. There’s a great fakeout where Martin approaches a pride, and one such beast takes off toward him at a gallop – only to wrap itself around him in a hug that makes Martin chuckle with the strength of the creature’s affection. If Leonardo DiCaprio’s fight with a bear in The Revenant was a “how’d they do that?” cinematic trick in 2015, digital effects have since caught up to make intimate contact between humans and lions seem credible without trickery in 2022 – and they won’t always be this tame.

See, Martin and Nate’s family travel down the road to a nearby native village, only to find the people reduced to so much carrion by some sort of unholy force that’s torn through the village. It can only be lions, but “Lions don’t do this,” says Martin. Well, it looks like they’ve found one who does, as a dying survivor confirms the attack, claiming it was carried out by a devil as per his beliefs. That devil will provide quite the challenge for that party after their car swerves off the road and becomes inoperable, with the mountains preventing any mobile signal from getting through.

This is a classic “man vs. wild” setup, but it plays like the most thrilling version thereof in the hands of Kormakur, Elba et al. (Screenwriter Ryan Engle also deserves credit for delivering this tight package, perhaps seeming right for the job after writing the Dwayne Johnson vehicle Rampage, based on the old video game.) Kormakur was responsible for the 2015 film Everest, his take on the John Krakauer book Into Thin Air, and that speaks well of his ability to churn out a taut portrait of human beings pushed to their limits and fighting for their survival. Despite that film’s higher prestige factor, Beast may give us the goods better with a relentlessly entertaining mix of close scrapes and poignant character work.

We spend most of our time with the four characters already introduced, and we are in good company throughout. The scenario is a somewhat common one, a father having lost the simple love of young daughters who are transforming into young women and recognising the ways their father is human, prone to failure. It gets a boost of something different by returning to the ancestral homeland of their mother, which has the effect of showcasing how growing up in America rather than here has made them into different people on the surface – even if something underneath still connects them to this place. The actors give it their all, which is no great shakes for a pro like Elba. We should put a spotlight on the work of Jeffries and Halley, though, as they must communicate how terrifying the current threat is. Their work underscores the life and death stakes of escaping a crashed car while a lion prowls just out of view.

Beast puts us in the shoes of this family, transferring their terror to us. It’s the sort of movie that reminds us of the difference between ticking boxes in this sort of disaster movie, and giving us something specific that we haven’t quite seen before. Jaws makes a useful point of comparison here, not because Beast is going to one day be considered a true classic of the genre, but because it presents us with ordinary people using available resources to avoid a gruesome death in the teeth of a beast. At least in Jaws, those guys were skilled nautical professionals.

The differences that elevate a movie like Beast are at all levels of the filmmaking, but it probably all comes back to Elba. It’s easy to forget that Elba broke into greater public awareness playing sinister characters, so well does he work as a man in over his head, with everything on the line. It’s no spoiler to say that there’s a one-on-one confrontation brewing here, as that’s been the focus of the film’s advertising campaign. I’ll take Elba in my corner, even when he’s making it up as he goes along, even if the only thing he has going for him is a desperate desire not to fail his daughters. That gives him the teeth of even the most ferocious beasts.

 

Beast is currently playing in cinemas.