SFF NOTES: Beast (2015, Dirs. Sam McKeith, Tom McKeith)

Jaime (Chad McKinney), a young boxer in Manila, stacks a fight at the request of his father and a nefarious Australian crime boss. As a result his opponent is put into hospital and Jaime stalks the city's street looking for a path to personal redemption.

There is a lot of talent on display in Beast, and every bit of it is up on the screen in the opening scene of this Australian/Filipinio co-production. The fight scene, viscerally shot by Michael Steel and directed by brothers, Sam and Tom McKeith, is harder hitting than it has any right to be. Almost all of this is down to the central performance by McKinney, an actual boxer and first time actor. His is a raw yet well-calibrated bout onscreen and he has a magnetism that outstrips his character or the screenplay he has to work with.

Beast's meandering flaws come into sharper and sharper focus as the film progresses. The screenplay by Will Jaymes and the directors clearly tries to eschew boxing fix clichés but in attempting to dodge them they've gone far too wide of the mark. The result is devoid of tension, to the point that I was crying out for a visit to a cliché hotspot or two. Nothing grabs here, not Jaime's relationship to his deadbeat father, not his attempt to assist his opponent's wife, not even the menace posed by crime syndicate cronies.

The copious use of back-focussed handheld camerawork may point to some post-neorealist pretensions, Rosetta in the Manila slums, say, but Beast lacks the pre-requisite texture of character, emotion and worldview to pull off such a feat.

We need to see more of Chad McKinney though.

★★☆

Trailer:

Beast screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.