Pedro Pascal leads Behemoth! as Alex, an inscrutable cello maestro who returns to Los Angeles after nearly two decades on the road. Tony Gilroy’s first feature since 2012’s The Bourne Legacy premiered at the New York film festival, putting a prestige classical music drama back into a director best known for Bourne films and TV work.
Pascal plays a musician who now earns money scoring TV shows and movies, and that practical detail gives Behemoth! its industry edge: this is a character study about a working player, not a conservatory prodigy fantasy. He is also closer to his brother, played by Will Arnett, and his mother, a respected harpist, while still carrying the memory of Nadia, played by Eva Victor, and their brief affair six years ago.
Alex, Nadia, and Los Angeles
The film’s engine is personal, not procedural. Alex comes home, plugs back into family life, and keeps circling the past, especially after Nadia’s death. That leaves him fixated on her daughter, played by Alexa Swinton, who is 15 years old and a musical prodigy, a setup that pushes the story from romance into grief and then into uneasy obsession.
One review comparison points to Tár, but Behemoth! moves with far less discipline. The nine A-list composers of The Behemoth! Collective divide the score across moods instead of one continuous musical line, so the soundtrack itself works like a set of abrupt pivots rather than a single through-composed arc. A reader expecting one elegant theme gets a collage instead.
A Russian doll structure
The review calls the film disorienting, and the structure explains why. Timeline leaps send the story folding back on itself like a Russian doll, then the tone jumps from bittersweet yearning to grief drama to Deadpool-esque action scenes. In one passage, Alex is chased through a mansion’s grounds by a pack of cuddly corgis; in another, the script reveals that he was a child prodigy who appeared on the Johnny Carson show at age six.
That kind of whiplash can read as risk or miscalculation depending on how much formal chaos a viewer will tolerate. The film wants the emotional reach of a prestige drama and the goofier freedom of a genre riff, and the result is a movie that keeps changing its own rules before the audience can settle in.
Pascal’s Oscar vehicle
Pascal’s strongest selling point here is not volume but range. Alex is written as a figure who can sit inside a tux, score a movie, revisit a six-year-old affair, and then veer into a scene where he says he lost his virginity at age 13 to a vocal arranger who later had sex with his dad. Olivia Wilde also appears as Alex’s current love interest, adding another pressure point to a story already crowded with memory, rivalry, and regret.
Behemoth! arrives as a serious awards-season play for Pascal, but the review’s bottom line is harsher than the packaging: the film is presented as prestige, yet its structure and tonal shifts pull against that promise. If Gilroy intended formal instability, he gets credit for nerve; if he did not, the movie’s own ambition is what trips it up.
