Heart of the Beast Movie Review: The Revenant With a Dog (4/5)

I went into Heart of the Beast expecting a survival thriller and came out of it quietly wrung out. No car chases. No shootouts. Nothing a trailer would build a drumbeat around. Just a man, his dog, a wrecked plane and a lot of snow, and somehow that was more than enough.

So this Heart of the Beast movie review will be light on plot and heavy on the question that actually matters: is it worth two hours of your evening once the kids are finally asleep? Short answer, yes. Four out of five, and put the tissues next to the remote for when it comes digital.

What Heart of the Beast is actually about

SPOILER ALERTS BELOW------->

The setup is as simple as it gets. Brad Pitt plays a man whose small plane goes down over the Alaskan wilderness. He lives. The dog lives. Everything after that is the two of them trying to get out of a place that clearly does not want them there.

David Ayer directs, and if you only know his name from louder films you might be braced for something different. This is a quiet film. It takes its time, it lets the cold do the talking, and a fair chunk of it is a man talking to his dog because there is nobody else left to talk to. That should feel thin. It doesn't, because the dog is the whole point.

If you want the honest one-line pitch: it is The Revenant with a dog. Same frozen misery, same slow crawl across a landscape that wants you dead, but with a relationship at the centre that stops it from becoming a two-hour endurance test.

The Revenant comparison holds up

The Revenant is a brilliant film that I have no real desire to sit through again. It is relentless, it is brutal, and it leaves you feeling like you have been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Heart of the Beast is gentler than that. It still puts its lead through the wringer, and there are moments where you feel every mile of it, but the dog changes the maths. A man on his own in the snow is a survival story. A man and his dog in the snow is a story about responsibility, and that is a much harder thing to watch when you have people at home who depend on you.

That is where this Heart of the Beast movie review lands, really. It is not a better film than The Revenant. It is a more human one, and I found it easier to care about.

Nothing explosive happens, and that is the point

Here is the strange bit: almost nothing happens for long stretches, and I was never bored. That is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds.

The film builds instead of detonating. Small things stack up. A decision about shelter. A decision about food. A decision about whether to keep going or sit down and stop. None of it is spectacular on its own, but by the final act it has added up to something that landed far harder than any explosion could have.

It is utterly watchable in the plainest sense: I put it on, I did not check my phone once, and when it finished I sat there for a minute before I got up. If that is not the test of a good film, I don't know what is.

The tissue warning is real

Grab some tissues. I am not being clever about that.

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I have sat through more animated films than I care to count, and I still had to do the thing where you pretend there is something in your eye. There is no swelling music telling you how to feel. The film just quietly puts a man and a dog in a bad situation and lets you do the maths yourself. If you have ever had a dog, or if you have ever been the one responsible for getting everybody home, it will find you.

Where it does not quite land

A few honest niggles, because a four out of five is not a five.

• It leans hard on one performance. Pitt carries it well, but if you do not buy into him, there is not much else to hold on to.

• The middle third is patient to the point of stillness. On a Friday night when you are knackered, that patience might feel like a slog rather than a build.

• If you are after plot, twists or momentum, this is not the film for you, and no amount of praise from me will change that.

Is it worth a cinema ticket?

Cinema tickets near us are neaeky £10 each now, before you even look at parking, so I am picky about what gets that money. This one earns it. The wide shots of empty country are built for a big screen, and the sound of wind and very little else is worth hearing properly.

That said, it will hold up perfectly well at home on a decent telly. It is not a film that needs the biggest room in the building. It needs you awake, and it needs you not scrolling.

Do not put it on with the kids in the room. It is not a family film, and the tension alone would have my lot asking questions I do not want to answer at bedtime.

Heart of the Beast movie review: the verdict

Four out of five.

It is a film that does not shout, does not cheat and does not outstay its welcome. Nothing explosive happens, and collectively it is a great watch. If you liked The Revenant but wished it would let you breathe, this is the one. If you want a dog film that earns its tears rather than demanding them, same answer.

Do one thing for me: watch the trailer first, then decide whether you have the headspace for it tonight. Some evenings you want noise. This is not a noise evening.

You can watch the trailer for Heart of the Beast on YouTube and see whether it grabs you.

Then come back and tell me in the comments whether the dog got you too, or whether