Is The Beautiful Beast a masterpiece of cinema? No. It is messy, pretentious, and the third act drags like a corpse through mud. But is it a masterpiece of atmosphere ? Absolutely.
The title invites immediate comparison to "Beauty and the Beast," but Chouraqui inverts the moral logic of the fairy tale. In the traditional tale, the Beast is a prince trapped in a monster's body, waiting for love to release his inner beauty. In The Beautiful Beast , the inversion is complete: Patrice is a prince in body but a monster in spirit.