The Sound of Unresolved Echoes: Inside Tony Gilroy’s "Behemoth!"
After a fourteen-year hiatus from the director’s chair, Tony Gilroy—the architect behind the searing political insurgency of Andor and the whip-smart corporate tension of Michael Clayton—has returned with a project that is as structurally daring as it is tonally elusive. Behemoth!, which recently premiered at the New York Film Festival to critical intrigue, is a film that masks its intimate, melancholic soul behind the curtain of a grand, sweeping title.
While the name suggests the kind of monolithic blockbuster Gilroy has spent years deconstructing, the film is, in reality, a delicate character study. It is a work that functions like a piece of classical music having lost its melody, only to find it scattered across a maze of overlapping leitmotifs. Featuring a restrained, magnetic performance by Pedro Pascal as a flighty, avoidant cellist, Behemoth! marks a bold pivot for a filmmaker known for precision, opting instead for the fluid, dream-logic of a man searching for his own rhythm.
The Premise: A Life Out of Sync
The film centers on Alex Sarian (Pascal), a brilliant cellist who returns to Los Angeles after two decades of self-imposed exile. Sarian is a man defined by his lack of center; a third-generation musician who was a child prodigy—having performed on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson at age six—he has spent a lifetime in the shadows of others, working as a session player for the very Hollywood machine he claims to despise.
Upon his return to the L.A. music scene, Sarian is hired to provide the score for a series of disparate, often laughable, commercial projects. It is here that Gilroy finds his thematic hook: the strange, inescapable alchemy of movie music. These compositions, inextricably bound to specific images from the moment they are conceived, mirror the way memories attach themselves to the people we never asked to have in our lives. As Sarian plays over the "Hollywood slop" he has been commissioned to record, the music begins to act as a temporal bridge, transporting him back to the unresolved ghosts of his past.
Chronology of a Disjointed Life
Gilroy eschews a linear narrative, instead using the recording process as a mechanism for time travel. The film’s structure is built on the rhythmic tension between the studio booth and the fragmented timeline of Sarian’s existence:
- The Chicago Gala (The Past): While recording the percussive, high-octane accompaniment for a generic action-comedy titled Spies Don’t Run, Sarian is suddenly thrust back to a frigid night in Chicago. He is attempting a clumsy, desperate exit from a symphony gala, fleeing the gaze of a wealthy donor’s wife (Olivia Wilde), with whom he has been engaged in a clandestine affair.
- The Dallas Stint (The Middle Years): During a session for a romantic drama called Seasons of Glass, the swelling waltz he is forced to play triggers a memory of a 2016 summer in Dallas. It was a time defined by a torrid, emotionally messy affair with a violinist (Eva Victor) whose own life was entangled with an L.A. billionaire (Matthew Lillard).
- The Present Infiltration: In perhaps the film’s most surreal sequence, Sarian is seen scoring a massive, top-secret blockbuster—also titled Behemoth!. The music is intercut with his real-time attempt to infiltrate a mansion to secure a DNA sample for a paternity test. The score transforms this mundane, desperate act of domestic intrusion into a high-stakes, Mission: Impossible-style setpiece, highlighting the disconnect between the grandeur of the music and the petty, messy reality of his life.
Supporting Data: A Symphony of Composers
The production of Behemoth! is as meta-textual as its plot. To capture the authentic, yet varying quality of film scores, Gilroy employed an unprecedented assembly of musical talent. Nine different composers—including industry titans Alan Silvestri, Michael Giacchino, and James Newton Howard—were brought in to create the "diegetic accompaniments" that define the film’s world.
This collaborative approach was not merely an aesthetic choice; it serves to reinforce the film’s commentary on the "Hollywood machine." By tasking these heavyweights with writing music for fictional films-within-the-film, Gilroy creates a sonic texture that is both technically impressive and intentionally hollow, reflecting Sarian’s own disillusionment with his profession. The "Behemoth! Collective," as they have been dubbed by the crew, successfully created scores that echo the essence of the real thing, effectively turning the movie’s soundtrack into a map of Sarian’s professional purgatory.
Implications: The Search for a Personal Tempo
The ultimate question posed by Behemoth! is one of agency. Throughout the film, Sarian is seen as a man waiting for a "conductor’s stick," a creature of habit who is perfectly comfortable being an accompanist in his own life.
The film’s supporting cast—including Will Arnett as a flameout podcaster brother, JoBeth Williams as his mother struggling with dementia, and Margarita Levieva as a long-time friend—are all potential anchors for Sarian. Yet, Gilroy refuses to let these relationships follow a conventional, sentimental arc. There is no neat resolution where the protagonist finds love or achieves professional redemption. Instead, the film explores the "notes between the notes."
The emotional core of the film hinges on Sarian’s interaction with a young, Billie Eilish-coded music prodigy, played with startling self-possession by Alexa Swinton. Through her, Sarian is forced to confront the advice he is incapable of following himself: "It comes alive when you make a decision."
A Departure from the "Andor" Style
For those expecting the sharp-edged, propulsive tension of Andor, Behemoth! will feel like a jarring, if welcome, departure. It is far more introspective, bordering on the impressionistic. While Michael Clayton was a masterclass in the tight, legalistic thriller, Behemoth! is a loose-limbed exploration of the Proustian reverie.
The film’s refusal to connect the dots—to offer a clean, psychological breakdown of why Sarian is the way he is—is its greatest strength. It treats the audience with the same intelligence it expects from its protagonist. By the time the film reaches its dolcissimo finale, it offers a profound realization: that something does not have to last to remain a part of you forever.
Conclusion: A Misshapen Jewel
Behemoth! is a film about the struggle to find one’s own meter in a world that constantly demands you play along with someone else’s sheet music. It is a movie that thinks of itself as a love letter to the craft of scoring, but in reality, it is a meditation on the fluidity of time and the weight of legacy.
Pascal’s performance is a masterclass in restraint. He portrays Sarian not as a man in crisis, but as a man in a state of perpetual, quiet drift. He inherits the tension between art and commerce from his father—a man who hated scoring cartoons but loved the royalty checks—and struggles to define his own worth outside of the industry that has chewed him up and spat him out.
In the end, Behemoth! is a misshapen, beautiful jewel of a film. It is slow to find its footing, perhaps intentionally so, but its gentle power is undeniable. By the time the final notes fade, the film leaves the viewer with the distinct sense that while the title promised a monster, what we received was something far more human, and far more resonant.
Grade: B+
“Behemoth!” premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures is scheduled to release the film in theaters nationwide on Friday, December 4, 2026.
