Loosely adapted from Henry James' 1903 novel The Beast in the Jungle, Bertrand Bonello's sci-fi drama film borrows the idea that there's something terrifying lurking in the future, a wild animal we cannot understand just waiting to ravage us.
In the near future, there's a programme called 'purification' which lets you rid yourself of emotions. The theory being that it makes you more efficient and able to perform better at work without all those human feelings getting in the way. Gabrielle signs up, and finds that part of the process involves reliving some past lives and working through repressed emotion. In each one, she finds herself drawn to Louis, and the film sets out to explore their connection in three different versions of their lives. Sensing that disaster is imminent, waves of feeling wash over Gabrielle.
"First, I wanted to paint a portrait of a woman and deal head-on with love and melodrama. Then to confront it with genre cinema, since to me romance and genre seem to respond to each other. My desire was to interweave the intimate and the spectacular, classicism and modernity, the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible. To speak, perhaps, of the most heartbreaking of feelings, the fear of love. It's also a portrait of a woman that almost becomes a documentary about an actress." (Bertrand Bonello)