Alaska does most of the heavy lifting in Heart of the Beast, and it does it all without really being asked. David Ayer’s survival drama spends its opening stretch simply looking—at black spruce running to the horizon, at braided grey rivers, at mountains that make the little plane crossing them look like a bug on a windshield. Cinematographer Mauro Fiore (Avatar, Training Day) shoots the country here with reverence, and the scale he builds is the film’s steadiest achievement. Nothing out here is hunting anybody. It is simply enormous, and indifferent, and that turns out to be frightening enough.
The man inside all that scale is James Belmont (Brad Pitt), a former Green Beret crossing the state in a small plane with Odin, his retired combat scout dog. Early on, the pair spend a night with a stranger named Watkins (J.K. Simmons), who sends them off with a book and a line about surviving the worst of man. The scene reads as ominous at first (Simmons has a gift for making hospitality feel like a setup) before softening into something genuinely warm, and it sets a bar the rest of the film keeps reaching for.
Pitt is excellent. Belmont narrates himself constantly, a device that usually curdles on screen, but it works because he is not really talking to himself. He is talking to the dog, and the dog is listening. Uber, the German shepherd playing Odin, carries an astonishing share of the film on posture, bark tone, and ear position alone.
That dynamic produces the film’s best idea, and Ayer trusts it more than anything else here. Belmont cannot say a true thing to another person, but he can say it to an animal. The film quietly proposes that some men only manage tenderness when it arrives disguised as duty—that affection has to be issued as an order before it can be spoken at all. Watkins’s parting line works on the same frequency. The wilderness here is punishing but never cruel, and the film keeps implying that whatever Belmont is walking away from was worse than anything this country can do to him.
A solo film in the wild lives or dies on sound, and this is where Heart of the Beast keeps tripping over itself. A plunge toward a waterfall should be pure terror: white noise, breath, a body losing its argument with the water. Instead, the score comes roaring in on top, burying a sequence that already had everything it needed. A storm in the plane gets the same treatment. Jared Michael Fry’s music is fine on its own terms; it is simply deployed as insurance against silence, and the silence would have been better.
The same over-insistence sinks a scene with a bear. The encounter unfolds in broad daylight, in long unbroken looks at the animal, and the effects work cannot survive that scrutiny. Unfortunately, the bear reads as goofy rather than overwhelming. The Revenant remains the benchmark precisely because it understood restraint: glimpses, chaos, proximity. Digital animals still do not hold up to a steady gaze, and filmmakers committed to them really ought to hide them more cleverly.
The structure does not help. The film opens on an image borrowed from its own final stretch, drops in a “one week earlier” card, and lets a good deal of tension leak out of everything that follows. Perhaps that is deliberate, a picture about endurance rather than outcome. Editor Dody Dorn (Memento, Fury) really knows her way around a rearranged timeline, making her a good choice to stitch everything together.
None of this wrecks the experience. Heart of the Beast is at its best when it stops pushing, when a man and a dog sit in an enormous field and the film lets them be small. Those passages are lovely, and Pitt and Uber sell the bond completely. It is a film with a real heart but a heavy hand, and across a trim 101 minutes it banks enough goodwill to survive its worst instincts. Anyone turning up for the dog will get what they came for. They may just wish Ayer had turned the volume down and let Alaska speak for itself.
Heart of the Beast debuts in theatres on September 25.
