Pedro Pascal plays the cad (and the cello) in the brilliant Behemoth!
Pedro Pascal plays the cad (and the cello) in the brilliant Behemoth!
Tim RobeyTue, October 13, 2026 at 5:30 PM UTC
0
Pedro Pascal and Will Arnett star as brothers in Behemoth! - Disney
Behemoth! is a rare beast these days: a sprawling, ornately handsome romantic drama that treats its audience as adults, in the way Sydney (The Way We Were) Pollack used to.
It’s also catnip for film music nerds. Nine composers – nine! – are credited on writer-director Tony Gilroy’s picture, because of the world it’s set in, and that’s before you count Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and a revolving door of jazz artists. If the film is a symphony spinning around one man, who forlornly plays the cello as we figure him out, it’s one that playfully hopscotches in its musical modes even more than Disney’s Fantasia did.
The world-class session musician playing all this repertoire, in ensembles great and small, is Pedro Pascal’s Alex Serian. We meet this cellist looking defeated by life in Los Angeles, where he’s lending his services on film scores whenever the work crops up. From there, we jump through his recent adventures in flashback – Chicago one moment, Dallas the next – where he’s often running into short-term relationships, or more often sprinting away from those that have run their course.
As cellist Alex Serian, Pascal is a closed book whose contents we want to intuit - Disney
He’s single, “mostly”. Don’t tell that to Carol (Olivia Wilde), an implacable spurned ex who tracks him down like a heat-seeking missile, practically anywhere he tries to hide. A rather more serious love interest, the willowy violinist Nadia (Sorry, Baby’s lovely Eva Victor), has a married beau waiting in the wings. She gets pregnant, though the paternity of her daughter Viviana (later played as a brilliantly precocious 15-year-old by Alexa Swinton) is undisclosed and becomes the main dramatic sticking point.
Advertisement
Olivia Wilde’s character Carol has been spurned by Pascal’s Alex - Disney
It all adds up to an intriguing change of pace for Gilroy, who hasn’t directed a film since The Bourne Legacy in 2012 (though he’s been kept pretty busy on the Star Wars TV spin-off Andor). In Alex, he has written the sort of protagonist we might recognise from Philip Roth’s novels: dissatisfied, personally and artistically, a serial user of women with a “Who, me?” attitude, sliding into middle age without a lot to show for it.
It’s fair to say that the female characters are (as in Roth) satellites – angry, thwarted, sad, and so on. It’s also telling that none get as much screen time as the excellent Will Arnett, who plays Alex’s semi-estranged, hard-drinking brother: a jazz podcaster in a floundering marriage.
For some, Behemoth! may feel like a rocky road to nowhere, but Gilroy’s wit and wordplay do a lot to enliven the journey. “My empathy is unlimited; my patience is not,” snaps Wilde, such a frosty shard in her three biting scenes that we distrust every syllable. “Play the Haydn and get the f--- out,” a fellow entertainer suggests at someone’s pointlessly lavish gender-reveal party.
Through it all, a rarely more handsome Pascal is a closed book whose contents we want to intuit – and he helps us get there, in the gently moving final stretches. There’s finicky skill in how Gilroy has composed this grand opus, but offhand joy in how he’s conducted it, too.
Now showing at the London Film Festival, then in UK cinemas from December 4
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
