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Appearing primarily as a piece of classical music that has lost its tune amid a maze of overlapping leitmotifs, “Behemoth!” by Tony Gilroy. something much sleeker and more elegant than the scale described by its title – and its illusion is also purposeful. Sure, there are car accidents, crane shots, and nine different composers to the film’s credit (with giants of the form like Alan Silvestri, Michael Giacchino, and James Newton Howard each contributing their own cred), but all that success has the odd effect of making the accessible film around them feel easier to slip through your fingers.
At its most basic, “Behemoth!” is a floating little character study about a hot but evasive cellist named Alex Sarian (Pedro Pascal) who returns to Los Angeles after 20 years of running away from it and is instantly restored to his memories when he starts working as a session player on several different film scores. That is the singular effect of film music – compositions that are closely linked to certain images from the moment they are brought into the world, as a family member they never asked for. Facing that strange alchemy for the first time since he abandoned the pictures for the philharmonic, and largely disinterested in the Hollywood slop he’s been hired to play over, Alex can’t help but map the arrangements onto the unresolved moments in his own life.
Perhaps, we think, the music will help make sense of the stray thoughts that bounce around his head, or at least turn them into the stuff of “Stardust Memories” – a funhouse to explore. It’s all too easy to imagine what an average filmmaker could do with that same concept. But Gilroy, so eager to defy expectations that he turned a mega-budget “Star Wars” show into an uncompromising political thriller about the brick-by-brick sacrifice needed to build a revolution, soon reveals more subtle and two-dimensional cinematic intentions than the premise of his latest feature suggests. By the time “Behemoth!” coming for him very sweet stunner of finish, it is more beneficial for that.
Recording the turbulent backing for a chase scene in an action comedy called “Spies Don’t Run”, Alex is back to a Chicago winter night where he tried to get out of a symphony gala without being caught by the incompetent blonde he was sleeping with (Olivia Wilde) – the married wife of a wealthy donor. Alex’s lover’s waltz is asked to play at his concert in the orchestra for a romantic drama called “Seasons of Glass” prompting him to travel a little further back in time and to the south, where a time in 2016 in Dallas was defined by the casual affair he had had with a brilliant violinist (Eva Victor, amazingly atonal) who was extremely committed to the LA (Matillillard). Later, a scene where Alex discovers a super secret code named “Behemoth!” interspersed with his latest memory of breaking into a mansion to steal a used toothbrush as a DNA sample for a paternity test, a scheme the music turns into a hilarious infiltration set worthy of the “Mission: Impossible” series.
Although Alex has never been able to hear the rhythm of his own life, the flow of his memories will soon reveal a pattern that is completely clear to us: The cellist is attracted to strong but unavailable women, and he is only too happy to connect them until the moment they threaten to reach a more stable harmony in his life. Alex’s talent is as obvious as his good looks (we find out later that he was a child, a third-generation musician so enamored of Hollywood glory that he performed on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” when he was only six years old), but he’s never been comfortable in the spotlight, and he refuses to stay anywhere long enough to find it. Unfortunately, Gilroy is going to torture this commitment-phobic virtue with a truth that a music lover should never be told: Something doesn’t have to last to stay with you forever.
Perhaps that explains why Gilroy doesn’t feel the need to tell Alex that. Or us. Smoother than “Michael Clayton” and even slicker than “Duplicity,” the “Andor” deity’s first film in 14 years may think of itself as a love letter to film scores and the people who make them, but “Behemoth!” most prefer to play the notes between the notes. “Cinema Paradiso” this is not.
Although Gilroy is not immune to the sentimental power of music, “Behemoth!” more interested in using it as a portal – as a way to sense how people move through time. He might start by turning Alex’s life into movie stuff (all moving camera moves and amazing dream logic), but gradually he starts to get involved in every way that Alex’s life is. No suitable for a Hollywood script, at least in terms of the way Gilroy chooses to show us. The flamboyant podcaster brother who looks nothing like him (Will Arnett), the senile mother (JoBeth Williams) whose dementia is taking him back home, the hotel tries to a long-time friend (Margarita Levieva) … it is rarely difficult to connect the dots between them.
Light on psychological detail and wishful thinking about how one thing leads to another, the film splits the difference between a Proustian devotee and a “Jay Kelly” lookalike. this is your life story; the music carves wormholes into the flow of space-time as Gilroy lightly nudges Alex to take control of where the sounds take him. He spent most of his life looking to a leader and “waiting for the stick,” but at a certain point he must find his own time. As a result of undergoing that study into its structure and movement, “Behemoth!” effectively responding to the same challenge.
Real and background, Pascal’s ambiguous performance resists explaining how Alex feels about the tension between art and money, which he inherited as a family heir. His father hated scoring cartoons, but he loved the rest. For his part, Alex seems very dissatisfied with the role he has to accept as a Tinseltown session musician – he loves the movies as much as they love him back (that is to say, in the work-starved Hollywood of 2026, not very much), and he says that every rehearsal doubles as an audition for the next gig. Does he look down on his brother for selling out so much? It’s hard to say. Does he despise the father for fucking them up so badly? Maybe, but I feel he also sympathizes with the fact that his father never knew who he was playing for. The obvious effort that Pascal spent using the cello pays off in the scenes where Alex intensely plays the instrument for his own private reasons, as if he were asking the same thing of himself.
A good film score can make the marriage of image and sound feel like destiny, and “Behemoth!” – the story of a life that was never properly synchronized with his soundtrack – commits to the uncertain process of reconciling how Alex sees himself with the music he hears in his head. That arrangement process takes priority over the music, and all this is incredible in its context (the reality of the group The Behemoth! is unconvincing, since the fake scores are completely similar to the meaning of the real ones), but many of these are not memorable in themselves. At least, not until it has to be. Not to the scene that makes a big impact where a certain piece is played with a presence that suggests that Alex’s sense of himself has, finally, been fatal.
The journey to that vague stunner of a finale is very strange and halting, like “Behemoth!” in the end the film is less about the power of film music or the people who play it than it is a film about one man’s need to connect himself with the soundtrack of his life. But Gilroy brings that process with a sense of discovery, so that it feels like Alex is relearning how to conduct himself in real time – to hear a different meter than the one running through his memories, and to prevent the musicians around him from being limited by the people who taught them how to play. “You have to pick a line and make a bet,” he barks at his cello accompanist about playing Mozart. “It comes alive when you make a decision.” This misfit gem of a film may seem slow to deliver its own advice, but it eventually makes good on that promise with a quiet power that will leave you feeling like a “Behemoth!” everything is as big as it sounds.
Grade: B+
“Behemoth!” will premiere at the 2026 New York Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, December 4.
