Terri White Reviews Rare Beasts - ‘Billie Piper’s ambitious, darkly funny directorial debut’
Single mother Mandy (Billie Piper) is a millennial woman in crisis. She’s fallen in love — or at least, into a relationship of sorts — with colleague and kinda-misogynist Pete (Leo Bill); she works for a toxic company; her parents (Kerry Fox, David Thewlis) have separated and her son (Toby Woolf) has behavioural issues. Will, can, feminism help her through it all?
A ★★★★ review of ‘Rare Beasts’ in Empire Magazine.
Mandy (Billie Piper) and Pete (Leo Bill) are in a restaurant on a date; they spit venom across the white tablecloth. Pete finds “women in the main, intolerable”, complains that these days they want “less intimacy, more head” and “have more testosterone coursing through their veins than blood”. Mandy for her part says quietly, “You’re going to rape me tonight, aren’t you? Those are classic rapist remarks.” And we’re only just through the credits of Billie Piper’s wild directorial debut.
‘Anti-romcom’, as the film’s been labelled, doesn’t quite cover it. Rare Beasts doesn’t so much lightly skewer love and romance as take a big old bulldozer to every corner of modern life. An investigation into whether you can be a feminist if you admit to wanting a man expands its focus to masculinity, the myth of having it all, self-help, the coarse rhythms of family life and the rage that throbs for all of us. Put simply: the utter confusion and conflict at the heart of our messy, modern lives. Can we get off yet?
It was written several years before I Hate Suzie (which Piper co-created), but the lineage is clear. Suzie and Mandy could be sisters, or probably (more likely) caustic cousins who get hammered and upend the buffet table, vol-au-vents flying. Pete (aka Jordan Peterson Lite) is every brutal, insecure, bitter guy, who can’t help but be mean when he’s hurt (and as Mandy points out: “You’re hurt all of the time”). And David Thewlis and Kerry Fox supply the unexpected heart to the film as Mandy’s estranged — though once clearly in love — parents.
Read the full review here