Behemoth!
The Music, the Memories, and the Art of Letting Go
Writer: Anya Duncan
Some people move through life collecting memories.
Others move through it collecting people, only to leave before those connections have the chance to take root. Behemoth! is a surprisingly touching film about a man who seems to belong to music and the peculiar sadness of a life spent keeping the world at arm’s length.
I was lucky enough to watch this film at its international premiere, and I’m not sure I could have asked for a better introduction. The cinema setting made all the difference. The soundtrack was, of course, a highlight: rich, expressive, and woven into the narrative in a way that felt genuinely creative. Alex’s soundtrack recordings overlap with the events unfolding on screen, allowing the music to become more than an accompaniment. It becomes the insight into Alex’s emotional undercurrent, carrying us through the memories and feelings that he struggles to articulate.
The film’s non-linear structure adds to that sense of distance. We are never given every answer, nor are we invited to understand Alex completely. One question that lingered for me was just how deep his relationship with Nadia Hynes (a talented violinist who became Alex’s lover during his time in Dallas) was. The film leaves that history tantalisingly out of reach, and I think that ambiguity serves a purpose. The world is always kept at arm’s length from Alex, and we, as the audience, are held at the same distance. We are shown what is vital, but rarely more than that. It is often only when Alex loses himself in music that he allows himself to become vulnerable, as though music can reach places in him that ordinary human intimacy cannot.
Written and directed by Tony Gilroy, Behemoth! follows Alex Serian, a gifted cellist who returns to Los Angeles after twenty years on the road. As he records film soundtracks and finds himself drawn back into the orbit of his family, fragments of his past begin to surface: his relationship with his father, years spent moving between orchestras, romantic entanglements that never quite settle into anything lasting, and a daughter who does not know he is her father. It is a film about memory, grief and the strange patterns we repeat, even when we cannot quite explain why.
The film’s central plot only really came into focus for me in the third act. Until then, we are left to drift alongside Alex, moving between different periods of his life without always understanding what holds them together. The reveal that these memories are accumulating around his brief interactions with his daughter brings a clarity that the earlier acts sometimes lack. Suddenly, the fragments begin to form a picture. The film's structure makes more emotional sense, and Alex's seemingly disconnected encounters take on a deeper significance.
My understanding is that Behemoth! wants us to recognise the patterns in Alex's life before we can understand his choices. He is a man who keeps moving. Even when he is given a golden opportunity to work alongside his daughter, he escapes to Vienna. By this point, we have been given enough of his history to understand why he might do so. Not necessarily because every decision feels inevitable, but because we have come to recognise the man making them.
This is simply who Alex is. He moves through life without gripping on to anyone too tightly, as though remaining in motion might spare him the discomfort of staying still long enough to be known.
How could we expect anything else?
Pedro Pascal is as charming as ever, and he feels like a natural choice for Alex. There is something wonderfully watchable about the way he inhabits this slightly elusive man, whose warmth never quite translates into the ability to stay. Alex is not an easy character to pin down, and Pascal gives him a quality that makes you want to keep watching, even when you are still trying to work out what, exactly, makes him tick.
But, if I'm honest, it was Olivia Wilde who stole the show for me.
Playing a woman hell-bent on capturing Alex as her lover, Wilde brings a glorious, almost unhinged energy to the film. Every time she appears on screen, the temperature changes. Her scenes are funny, unpredictable and often completely ridiculous in the best possible way. I particularly loved the moment when she and Alex's brother turned up at his door at midnight to ask for his blessing. Watching Alex attempt to navigate that conversation is an absolute delight. There is so much humour in his discomfort, and Wilde makes the whole encounter even funnier by playing her character with such unrestrained conviction.
But for all the charm of its performances, the humour of its stranger encounters and the ingenuity of its musical construction, Behemoth! is ultimately concerned with a more melancholy question: what happens when a person becomes so accustomed to leaving that staying begins to feel almost unnatural?
Alex's life is shaped by absence. There are people he has loved, people he has lost and people he has never quite allowed himself to know. The film does not offer a neat explanation for every relationship, nor does it attempt to resolve every uncertainty. Instead, it gives us the fragments and asks us to recognise the pattern.
I found that approach surprisingly touching. He is surrounded by the sounds of other people's stories, but his own remains difficult to articulate.
Behemoth! may take a while to reveal what it is building towards, and its non-linear structure occasionally leaves us searching for a foothold. But by the time the pieces begin to fall into place, I found myself looking at Alex differently. His restlessness no longer seemed like a series of unrelated decisions. It felt like a way of being in the world one that has brought him music, adventure and love, but has also kept him at a distance from the people who might have given those things a more lasting shape.
For me, its greatest achievement is not in answering every question, but in allowing us to feel the weight of the ones it leaves unanswered.
