Beast review – Idris Elba takes on a lion in a ferociously fun thriller

The star anchors a surprisingly effective South Africa-set B-movie about a family who find themselves stalked by a particularly gnarly lion

The dog days of summer have been rougher than ever in Hollywood this year, a damp end to a brighter than expected season. Front-loaded scheduling and a weaker than usual crop of August releases led to last weekend’s box office total being the lowest since May. But it’s a month that has often provided simple genre pleasures, especially on the heels of such overpriced indulgence (previous Augusts have given us Searching, Don’t Breathe and You’re Next), and after last week’s brutally effective survival thriller Fall (which also tanked, natch), this Friday’s similarly taut Beast works as another refreshing post-tentpole balm.

It’s got a costlier price tag than Fall ($36m v just $3m) and tracking suggests it might struggle to be profitable but if audiences do venture back out to the multiplex to see it, they’ll probably be as entertained as I, a no-frills B-movie pitched just right after so many A-movie counterparts got it so wrong. Like 2019’s slick summer surprise Crawl, it’s another to-the-point R-rated creature feature, light on plot and heavy on thrills, and this time it’s a lion doing the stalking and Idris Elba doing the trying not to die. Despite Elba’s prolific nature, it’s still rare for him to take the lead (he’s usually within an ensemble or sharing top billing) and Beast awards him ample screen-time to show us why he deserves more of it. Like in the underrated 2017 adventure The Mountain Between Us, he’s hugely believable in hyper-competent, high-stakes survival mode and here, he’s forced to figure a way out of a nightmarish trap when a South African vacation goes horribly wrong.

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