Critic Reviews

Billie Piper’s ambitious, darkly funny directorial debut suggests the arrival of a new filmmaker with a vision, verve and a voice.

Rare Beasts is a bold experiment in nerve-jangling confrontation: it has the structure and ingredients of romantic comedy but turns everything on its head.

Billie Piper’s first feature-length movie as screenwriter and director may have bitten off more than it could chew, but it is a daring debut that marches to the beat of its own drum. I respect it for that and enjoyed it more often than not.

An occasional brilliantly funny but exasperatingly chaotic, vignette-style examination of relationships, male rage, and female insecurities.

Piper will reveal the strings of a stage set to slow things down or turn extras into kangaroo-court jurors to throw shoes on instinct instead of reason. She’s throwing convention to the wind to expose love and life’s glorious mess—whether you’re ready or not.

It’s not a perfect movie. Sometimes it moves very slowly. Other times the acting is so big it becomes pantomime. But what Piper is incredible at (in both this and I Hate Suzie) is taking the raw, intense, angry energy, that builds when you’re forced to spend too much of your life tackling the toxicity of masculinity around you, and pouring it out like a long line of acid shots for viewers to chug.

To be sure, there are moments where the film’s studied quirkiness achieves something close to Piper’s objective, but the movie is so maddeningly uneven and brazenly combative that it’s hard to surrender to its ambition.

The trouble is, Rare Beasts lacks the razor wit, merciless candour and stylistic panache of Fleabag and I May Destroy You – not to mention Piper’s own Sky Atlantic series I Hate Suzie, made after Rare Beasts with the playwright Lucy Prebble, and broadcast last year.

It’s a movie that’s confrontational and awkward from the start, distancing its viewer with an acerbic perspective and characters that trade more thorny verbal jabs and slaps than anything resembling warm affection.