Tony Gilroy has earned the right to a swing. The Bourne franchise, Michael Clayton, Andor — he's one of the few American directors who can thread commercial craft and genuine dramatic intelligence without either side collapsing. Behemoth! is his first directed feature since 2012, and the promise on paper is real: a womanizing cello maestro, nine composers collaborating under a collective name, a cast that includes Pedro Pascal, Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, and Will Arnett, and a premise clearly positioned in the post-Tár conversation about genius, monstrosity, and music. What arrives on screen is something considerably less interesting. The structural problem is the film's Russian doll timeline, which leaps between periods without earning any of the leaps. Tony Gilroy is smart enough to know that non-linear structure has to do work — in Michael Clayton it revealed moral stakes; in Andor it built dread. Here the flashbacks seem to exist because the screenwriters read Gillian Flynn and decided that temporal disorientation signals sophistication. It doesn't, not when the present-tense storyline isn't generating enough tension to make us desperate for the past. Alex, the cello maestro Pascal plays, is described by the film itself as 'the kind of guy that stuff just happens to' — and the movie seems to agree with this assessment while also expecting us to find him magnetic. He moves home to Los Angeles after nearly two decades touring, takes soulless session work scoring TV and films, reconnects with his brother (Will Arnett, deployed at the emotional depth of a fist-bump) and his ailing harpist mother, and carries an obsession with Nadia, a violinist he had a passionate affair with six years ago. After Nadia's death, Alex becomes fixated on her fifteen-year-old daughter, wondering whether he might be the girl's father. These are substantial dramatic materials. Gilroy lurches past them. Eva Victor — the breakout of Sorry, Baby — is pyrotechnic in the flashbacks. She's on screen for roughly five percent of the runtime, which tells you everything about the film's miscalibrated priorities. Olivia Wilde gets a scenery-chewing role as Alex's current love interest that amounts to: scream at him, look fierce, contribute to one bizarre third-act moment, exit. Alexa Swinton, as the possible daughter and musical prodigy, is sweet but undercooked. The film's relationship with its women is one of its most consistent failures — they exist to apply pressure to Alex rather than to exist in their own right, which is a particularly uncomfortable dynamic given the subject matter. Tonally, the film is genuinely all over the place in a way that feels less like controlled genre collapsing and more like indecision. Bittersweet character study gives way to grief drama gives way to — and this is not a metaphor — Deadpool-esque action sequences involving Pedro Pascal being chased through a mansion by a pack of corgis. The corgi scene might have worked in a film with a consistent comic register. In Behemoth! it lands like a dropped instrument in a concert hall. The revelations about Alex's childhood — performing on Johnny Carson at six, losing his virginity at thirteen to a vocal arranger who subsequently slept with his father — are the kind of biographical data that should reshape how we read every scene. Instead they arrive mid-film and evaporate almost immediately. Pascal is the film's most persistent problem. His Alex is described as inscrutable, but the script asks inscrutable to carry weight that only comes with specificity. A furrowed brow is not a character. Whether this is a directorial choice (grief as dissociation, genius as absence) or simply Pascal's default register in the wrong vehicle is genuinely unclear — which is itself a damning observation. Tár worked because Cate Blanchett built a character so specific you couldn't look away even when she appalled you. Alex gives you nothing to hold onto and the film doesn't seem to know whether that's the point. The nine-composer Behemoth! Collective is the film's most interesting formal gamble — a score built collectively for a film about the tensions of musical collaboration and individual genius. Whether the score delivers on that conceit is almost impossible to judge from reviewing the film itself, because Gilroy's direction never establishes a stable enough tonal register for the music to define or contest. It becomes wallpaper. For a film that names itself after enormity, Behemoth! is startlingly easy to shrug off.
