Deliberately unfolding like a piece of classical music that has lost its melody amid a maze of overlapping leitmotifs, “Behemoth! ” by Tony Gilroy is a much more slippery and elegant thing than the scale implied by its title – the deception of which is also intentional. Of course, there are car crashes, crane hits, and nine different composers to the film’s credit (with giants of the form like Alan Silvestri, Michael Giacchino, and James Newton Howard each providing their own diegetic accompaniments), but all these over-the-top flourishes have the strange effect of making the elusive film around them easier to slip through your fingers.
At its most basic level, “Behemoth!” ” is a buoyant little character study about a sexy but avoidant cellist named Alex Sarian (Pedro Pascal) who returns to Los Angeles after 20 years on the run and is immediately seduced by his memories when he begins working as a session musician on a variety of different film scores. This is the singular effect of film music: compositions that are inextricably linked to certain images from the moment they are brought into the world, like a person to the family they never asked to have. Confronted with this strange alchemy for the first time since he abandoned films for the Philharmonic, and largely disinterested in the Hollywood filth he was hired to do, Alex can’t help but map the arrangements onto unresolved moments in his own life.
Maybe, we think, music will help make sense of the stray thoughts that come into his head, or at least turn them into a “Stardust Memories”-type funhouse to explore. It’s too easy to imagine what a conventional filmmaker could do with this same concept. But Gilroy, so eager to buck expectations that he turned a mega-budget “Star Wars” series into an uncompromising political thriller about the brick-by-brick sacrifice required to build a rebellion, soon reveals cinematic intentions that are subtler and more ambivalent than the premise of his latest feature suggests. The moment “Behemoth!” » comes to his dolcissimo a stunning ending, it’s all the more gratifying than that.
Recording the percussive accompaniment for a chase scene in an action comedy called “Spies Don’t Run,” Alex returns to the winter night in Chicago where he attempted to escape from a symphony gala without being caught by the indomitable blonde he had been sleeping with (Olivia Wilde) – the much-married wife of a wealthy donor. The love waltz that Alex is asked to play during his concert in the orchestra for a romantic drama called “Seasons of Glass” inspires him to travel a little further back in time and to the South, where a stay in Dallas in 2016 was defined by the nonchalantly steamy affair he had with a brilliant violinist (Eva Victor, wonderfully atonal) who was half-engaged to a Los Angeles billionaire (Matthew Lillard). Later, a scene where Alex makes a top secret blockbuster called “Behemoth!” is interspersed with his more recent memory of sneaking into a mansion to steal a used toothbrush as a DNA sample for a paternity test, a pattern that the music transforms into a comedic infiltration setting worthy of the “Mission: Impossible” series.
Even though Alex was never able to hear the rhythm of his own life, his trail of memories soon betrays a pattern that is abundantly clear to us: the cellist is attracted to strong but unavailable women, and only too happy to string them along until they threaten to establish a more permanent harmony with his life. Alex’s talent is as obvious as his dashing good looks (we later discover that he was something of a child prodigy, a third-generation musician so primed for Hollywood glory that he starred on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” when he was just six), but he has never been comfortable in the spotlight and refuses to stick around long enough for it to find him. Alas, Gilroy is about to torture this commitment-phobic virtuoso with a truth no music lover should ever have to hear: something doesn’t have to last to stay with you forever.
Perhaps this explains why Gilroy doesn’t feel the need to tell Alex. Or us. More choppy than “Michael Clayton” and even slipperier than “Duplicity,” the deity’s first “Andor” film in 14 years could be considered a love letter to movie scores and the people who make them, but “Behemoth!” mostly prefers to play the notes between the notes. “Cinema Paradiso” is not the case.
Although Gilroy is not immune to the sentimental power of music, “Behemoth!” is more interested in using it as a portal – as a way to make sense of how people move through time. It might start by transposing Alex’s life into the stuff of a film (all the swooping camera movements and fantastical dream logic), but it gradually begins to confront all the ways in which Alex’s life doesn’t lends itself to a Hollywood storyline, at least in terms of how Gilroy chooses to show it to us. The dead podcaster brother who looks nothing like him (Will Arnett), the senile mother (JoBeth Williams) whose dementia brings him home, the hotel date he has with a longtime friend (Margarita Levieva)… it all feels like the makings of a familiar drama even before we learn of Alex’s fascination with an L.A. music prodigy coded by Billie Eilish (an impossibly confident Alexa Swinton of itself), but “Behemoth!” rarely bothers to connect the dots.
Light on psychological details and mindless on how one thing leads to another, the film walks the line between a Proustian reverie and a “Jay Kelly” movie. it’s your life history; the music carves wormholes into the flow of space-time as Gilroy gently nudges Alex to take control of where the sounds take him. He’s spent most of his life watching a conductor and “waiting for the stick”, but at some point he’s going to have to find his own tempo. By imbuing this research into its structure and movement, “Behemoth!” effectively submits itself to the same challenge.
Real and recessive, Pascal’s understated performance resists explaining how Alex feels about the tension between art and money, which he inherited as a family heirloom. His father hated composing cartoons, but loved residue. For his part, Alex seems vaguely dissatisfied with the role he’s forced to accept as Tinseltown’s session musician – he loves the movies as much as they love him back (that is, in a job-starved Hollywood 2026, not much), and laments the fact that every rehearsal doubles as an audition for the next gig. Does he despise his brother for selling out so eagerly? It’s hard to say. Is he mad at their father for screwing them both over so much? Probably, but I feel like he also sympathizes with the fact that his father never really knew what he was playing for. The obvious effort Pascal has put into practicing the cello pays off in scenes where Alex plays the instrument intensely for his own private reasons, as if wondering the same thing.
Good film music can make the marriage of image and sound feel like destiny, and “Behemoth!” — the story of a life that was never properly in sync with its soundtrack — engages in the uncertain process of reconciling the way Alex sees himself with the music he hears in his head. This process of reconciliation takes precedence over the music, which is credible in its context (the verisimilitude of the collective The Behemoth! is impeccable, because the false scores invariably echo the essence of the real ones), but of which little is memorable in itself. At least, not until it’s necessary. Until the deeply touching scene where a certain piece is performed with a timeliness that suggests Alex’s sense of self is finally made diegetic.
The journey to this understated stunner of a finale is strange and halting, like “Behemoth!” ” is ultimately less a film about the power of film music or the people who play it than about a man’s need to make his own associations with the soundtrack of his life. But Gilroy imbues this process with an unforced sense of discovery, so that it feels like Alex is relearning how to conduct himself in real time—to hear a different rhythm than the one running through his memories, and to keep the musicians around him from being limited by the people who taught them to play. “You have to choose a path and commit to it,” he barks to his cellist mentee about playing Mozart. “It comes alive when you make a decision.” This misshapen gem of a film may seem slow to heed its own advice, but it ultimately delivers on that promise with a smooth power that leaves you feeling like “Behemoth!” is just as big as it looks.
Grade: B+
“Monster!” premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it theatrically on Friday, December 4.
Gn entert
