start to a film and is likely why the mixed Behemoth! reviews are pouring in. Still, the film is surrounded by nine classical composers baking music into its score, its plot and its soul, and any orchestral-music lover will be pulled in immediately and repeatedly by the music’s changing tones. The film’s final act takes what had been a good movie with some illuminating moments and turns it into a minor masterpiece of the 2020s, with laugh-out-loud beats that fit just outside the general plot and an ending that, at least to us, carries real emotional weight that far surpasses a simple reveal or musical session. Behemoth! is Gilroy writing and directing at his most polarizing, but also his most creative, crafting a character that fits well with the strengths of Pascal as an actor. It also confirms that the slow build of Andor was not a one-off but a sign of sharpened instincts and complex storytelling that really pays off in this quiet and divisive Oscar contender.

Behemoth! follows Alex, a classically trained cellist, through a deliberately fractured structure that moves between his youth as a prodigy inside a musical family and his adult life recording film scores out west after walking away from a Chicago orchestra. His journey is told almost entirely through the music itself and through the people orbiting him, with the relationships and the recording sessions serving as the markers of time rather than anything resembling conventional plot progression. The tough conversations are where the film does its heaviest work, and Gilroy writes them with the same precision he brings to political material, letting people talk around what they actually mean for long, uncomfortable stretches before anything gets said outright. The flat, muted quality Pascal brings to Alex is the key to the entire thing, because the flatness of his daily life is exactly what makes the expressiveness of his playing register as the only place this man is ever fully present. The late-film funeral is the hinge: the reveal there supplies the context the first half of the film has been quietly withholding, retroactively reorganizing everything you have sat through up to that point into something considerably sadder.

Pascal is inward in this role and spends the first half of the film letting the character come into focus gradually rather than announcing who Alex is in the opening frames, which is the opposite of what he has been asked to do in almost everything else over the last five years. It is the most restrained work of his career and a deliberate rejection of the charisma that made him one of the biggest names in the business, a risk that pays off completely once you understand what the film is actually doing with him. The physicality of the cello work is convincing enough that it never pulls you out of the picture, and the way he holds himself while playing is doing real characterization that the dialogue doesn’t have to handle. His muted affect outside the music could easily have read as a limitation in a lesser performance, but here it reads as the mark of a man who has poured everything he has into a single channel and has nothing left over for anybody standing in front of him. By the time the final act arrives, every quiet choice he made across the first ninety minutes has gradually become load-bearing, which is the clearest possible evidence of how carefully this performance was constructed from the ground up.