Your Movie Library
Cast
- Shirley ChenKrista
- José ÁngelesNito
- Will MaddenAdam
- Courtney DietzJohanna
- Daniel RashidYoni
- Anissa MatlockLena
- Stephen RuffinJarrett
- Chip CarriereLance
- Kron MooreLinney
- Susan GallagherMrs. Gunderson
Recommendations
- 80
TheWrap
Though I have some reservations about a choice made towards the end of the film, everything else — from the cast to the documentary-style filmmaking to the varying perspectives of different characters from diverse backgrounds — is ambitious and intriguing. - 70
Film Threat
Beast Beast captures the high school experience like lightning in a bottle. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
All three young actors who play the leads deliver solid performances that make them effortless tour guides through their intersecting stories. - 70
Los Angeles Times
Youthful self-expression is a joyride in a minefield in Danny Madden’s Beast Beast, an adrenalized, tone-shifting indie bringing the technology-fueled lives of three suburban souls of varying circumstances, hopes and concerns into pathways destined to converge. - 67
IndieWire
If there is a valuable movie to be made in the wake of America’s most recent wave of mass shootings, Beast Beast offers only tantalizing hints of what it might look like. And yet Madden’s eye is nevertheless sharp enough to draw some blood; the kids are alright, they’ve just had the bad luck of being raised in a country that can’t seem to give a shit why so many of them don’t survive to become adults. - 60
Variety
Beast Beast’s plot twist is a swing at gravitas that disrupts the balance of Madden’s naturalistic character study. This is the way teen life is, Madden says, until suddenly the film accelerates from reality to sensationalism, and trades humanity for pulp. - 50
Austin Chronicle
The narrative trick that worked within the narrower confines of Krista seems almost absurd here, a leaden feel-good ending that sits at complete odds with the formless opening. Beast Beast is far better when it's abstract and observational, drifting somewhere between the wistful compassion of Jonah Hill's Mid90s and the sociological immediacy of Larry Clark's Kids. - 42
The Film Stage
Beast Beast has no real drive to it, and it becomes especially apparent once something actually “happens.”
