Rare Beasts Review

Billie Piper is a great actress. With Rare Beasts, her feature film writing and directorial debut, it appears she also has solid directorial chops as well – although her script leaves a bit to be desired. What we get with the film is a stellar starring turn from Piper, but a confused narrative that has a lot of interesting ideas that the film never takes the time to flesh out into complex arcs or characters. It’s a story that skates on the surface of a deep lake, never breaking the ice to get into what makes its characters tick.

The film opens with Mandy (Piper), a single mother trying to juggle a difficult son, two difficult parents (David Thewlis and Kerry Fox – both of whom I would have liked to have seen more of), and a demanding career, on a date with her (not all that likeable) co-worker Pete (Leo Bill, doing a great job at finding some charming elements in a pretty charmless character), a man who longs for the days of “traditional” values. Despite the date being what you or I would classify as a catastrophe, the pair enter into a masochistic relationship that lays the foundation for the film to follow. Now, if you’re like me, you’ll likely spend much of the film wondering why Mandy would continue seeing someone who has so many bright red flags surrounding him. Trouble is, we never get deep enough into that portion of Mandy’s psyche to understand what has drawn her to this troubled relationship.

Does he, unconsciously, remind her of her deadbeat father and his strained and combative relationship with her mother? Or is it because Pete seems to have some level of rapport with her son, Larch? Or does she just not have enough self-confidence to push back and end things when Pete gets on a tear? Luckily we have Piper’s performance, which tells us that this is a woman who is drowning, even if the story can’t let us in on the why. She’s struggling at work, struggling at home, desperately wants to find that fairy tale romance – that the film ultimately posits doesn’t exist – and she ends up with Pete. This lack of characterization with Mandy; this failure to show us what is really going on behind her actions gets at the heart of the issue with the story as a whole. The film doesn’t take the time to build up its characters or delve into their motivations. Instead, it hints at a number of interesting topics – love, family, motherhood, working women, sexism, misogyny, the desire to “have it all” – but never takes the time to expand on the quick hits the script provides.

There’s a chaotic style to the direction as well, but that works a good deal better than the scattered nature of the script. A sequence late in the film veers into the experimental and it works, considering the mental state of Mandy at that phase of the story. Watching her internal fears and struggle play out in this extended sequence is the closest we get to fully understanding her character. But the inability of the story to hit on this deeper level in the previous hour means the revelations Mandy makes in this sequence don’t hit the way Piper wants them to. Which is a shame, as there would be an interesting story here, if only the script opted to focus on a single issue in depth – or perhaps make this a deeper character study on Mandy. With Pete and Mandy jockeying for focus, and a lack of deep dives into either, it’s a lost cause.

So, is Rare Beasts worth a look? If you’re a big fan of Piper’s and are up for an uneven but visually interesting film, yes. But if you prefer your films with a strong, focused script to go along with strong performances and interesting direction, this isn’t your movie. Piper absolutely has the chops to continue making films – all she needs to do is hone her writing a bit more and she’ll truly be a force to be reckoned with in the film world.

Rare Beasts opens in limited release in theatres on Friday, August 20^th.