The best directors have a native language, a mode they think in, and the interesting thing about a filmmaker as disciplined as Tony Gilroy is watching him speak it in a context where it does not belong. Gilroy’s language is the thriller. He wrote the Bourne films, he made Michael Clayton and Ides of March, and he spent the last four years building Andor into the most grown-up thing the Star Wars name has ever attached to. All of those are stories of tension, of information withheld and doled out, of people moving through danger. Behemoth!, his first film in fourteen years, is none of those things on its surface. It is a personal drama about a cellist and his family; and the reason it works as well as it does, the reason it is one of the best films of the year, is that Gilroy builds that intimate drama entirely out of a thriller’s tools.
Behemoth! is one of those rare movies where the trailer and the actual experience diverge enough that knowing too much going in would rob you of something, and so this will be a deliberately spoiler-light account. The premise is all you need: Alex Serian, a gifted cellist and former child prodigy from a storied musical family, has left an orchestra behind and returned to Los Angeles to record film scores and settle some long-unfinished personal business. Pedro Pascal plays Alex, and Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, and Will Arnett also star. Gilroy writes and directs. What the film becomes from that starting point is best discovered in a theater, cold, which is exactly how it ought to be seen.
This is a five out of five, and the clearest reason is Pedro Pascal, who has quietly been one of the most beloved actors alive without ever landing the kind of role that forces the awards conversation. Pascal gives a career-best performance, holding the center of a film built around the accumulating weight of a life, and he carries it right up to a climactic stretch that is almost entirely wordless, the emotional freight of everything that has come before landing on his face alone. It is the kind of dialogue-free acting that separates a movie star from an actor, and he does it so completely that it feels like the thing that finally pushes him over the line into a nomination. There is no other lead performance this year quite like it in the front-runner tier, and watching him get there is the film’s deepest pleasure.
The ensemble around him is just as precisely deployed. Olivia Wilde arrives as a manic, obsessive ex and is used in exactly the right dose, big and chaotic and all over Alex while he absorbs her with a nonplussed calm, and the contrast is a delight to watch. Eva Victor, whose own Sorry, Baby was a highlight last year, has a small role that matters far more than its screen time suggests, pivotal in the larger architecture of the story. And Will Arnett does the most interesting work of the bunch, turning in a performance with real nuance after a lighter outing earlier this year; his familiar screen persona still bleeds through at the edges, but the character is built on far more than that, and he rises to it.
The craft underneath all of this is where the thriller DNA shows, and it is the film’s quiet masterstroke. The structure is nonlinear, flashing across almost two decades of Alex’s life, and it is engineered with a thriller’s precision: it gives you exactly the piece of information you need at exactly the moment before you need it, the way a good suspense film plants a detail three scenes before it pays off. That withholding-and-revealing rhythm is not how dramas usually move, and applying it here keeps a character study taut where it would otherwise drift. The film reinforces the trick through its score, too. Because present-day Alex is scoring movies for a living, the film keeps slipping into whatever genre fits the moment, thriller cues, a love theme, the different registers bleeding into and against one another, so that the music itself is always reminding you how constructed the emotion is. It is a daring, formally alive choice, and it works because drama and thriller are not opposites so much as cousins; the tools of one deepen the other.
That formal confidence extends to the filmmaking itself, which is phenomenal throughout. Gilroy uses long tracking shots to let you live inside a scene rather than cutting you out of it the moment the point is made, and then deploys quick cuts precisely when the rhythm demands them. It is the same instinct that made Andor feel so textured, the patience to hold on a moment, and it is why Behemoth! needs to be seen in a theater, in a distraction-free environment where the film’s deliberate pacing and immersive sound can do their work on you without interruption. This is big-screen filmmaking in the oldest and best sense, a movie that trusts you to sit inside it.
Behemoth! is the kind of film that justifies the return of a major talent after more than a decade away, a drama of real intelligence and feeling built by a master of a different genre entirely, and all the stronger for the fusion. It is headed for the awards conversation and belongs there, carried by a Pedro Pascal performance that may finally win him the recognition he has long deserved. See it in a theater, and see it knowing as little as possible, because part of what makes it great is the way it unfolds in front of you. This is one of the year’s best, and it earns every bit of its ovation.
