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Behemoth!
How long does it take to work through one’s upbringing and create one’s own identity? Can one ever get off the train of unreconciled emotions and take control, instead of playing the passive voyeur? Writer/director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) answers these questions by investigating the life of fictional cellist and film composer Alex Serian (Pedro Pascal) in Behemoth!. The comedic drama had its world premiere as the Centerpiece film at the 64th New York Film Festival.
With the kind of superb performance that only Pascal can give, Behometh! draws in its audience with vignettes scored by nine of the industry’s stellar composers. Constructed like a symphony with movements, the film explores seminal moments in the cellist’s familial and romantic life. Each composer scores a different vignette/scene. Threaded together, the scenes represent dramatic turning points key to Serian’s emotional upheaval in a flashback retrospective. Cleverly, Gilroy intercuts these events with Serian’s present. In a fascinating twist, the music, like a defining character, reveals his emotional and mental state during the various vignettes.
Initially, the film shows Serian in Los Angeles where he joins the orchestra on a sound stage and meets old friends to record Hollywood film scores. There, we discover he also must resolve family business, because his mother has dementia and can’t adequately care for herself. In the present, while he plays film scores, he flashes back to the past and his loves, family arguments, and regrets. Indeed, he attempts to reconcile his emotional angst through his vigorous playing.
The Hollywood orchestra scores sync with events in Alex’s remembrances. When he plays the film scores, he superimposes them on his memories. In effect he scores his own life in Behemoth!, whose title symbolizes not only himself but a new family member.
With care Gilroy intercuts the cellist playing the music from the film scores in the present with his chaotic past. Thus, Behemoth!’s narrative can’t be linear. It follows the music he plays as the engineers record the film scores on the soundstage and the remembered events his mind reconstructs. In the flashback scenes, we learn why he escaped to L.A.: He left his position with an orchestra in Chicago to escape a disastrous affair with the obsessed wife of the orchestra’s philanthropist.
A terrific and terrifying Olivia Wilde stalks and haunts Serian in a masterful portrayal of a privileged woman who never takes “no” for an answer. With humor and horror, Wilde’s obsessed character runs amuck to keep Alex as hers. Instead of pressing charges for stalking, or getting a court order against her, he runs away, an ineffectual response, as she continues to unexpectedly pop up, sometimes with shock and awe. The accompanying music to the frantic scenes of Serian running from her and from other situations reflects his panic and fear. Gilroy’s rapid editing and the close-ups of Serian’s face as he escapes draw in the audience into his personal inner struggle.
During flashbacks we learn about Serian’s identity as a former child prodigy. Music centers his life but he lives in the shadow of a storied musical family. His emotional chaos has him travel as an itinerant cellist, escaping to different cities and women and distracting him from his true potential. He doesn’t fully realize his skills, and his love Nadia packs up and leaves after calling him out for his passivity and unreliability.
We come to understand that the music accompanies and comments upon Serian’s desire for balance and peace from his torments. It also resonates with beauty, for Alex receives healing and redemption from the music that builds to an epiphany. The nine composers are Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, Brandon Roberts and Alan Silvestri. NYFF 2026 also featured excerpts from the score during intervals in festival moments.
Behemoth! celebrates the power of music as a love letter to those who make music and uplift our souls. The nine composers’ work highlights an incredible score. Additionally, the ensemble work by Eva Victor, Alexa Swinton, Will Arnett and others helps to make this unique, elegant film a standout.
Behemoth! will screen in select theaters beginning on December 4, 2026. The NYFF schedule may list possible releases of tickets.
