New York 2026 Review: BEHEMOTH!, Total Ungrip of the Heart

Alex Serian (Pedro Pascal), a cellist coming from a long line of musicians, returns to Los Angeles after years of a nomadic life, playing in orchestras all over the country.

His latest tenure in Chicago ended with a terrible accident and one of Alex’s ex-lovers (Olivia Wilde) stalking him.

As Alex settles into his new job with an orchestra in Los Angeles, tasked with recording the score for a big studio movie, his past and present collide in a web of episodes, set in multiple timelines. Those involve former romantic entanglements (the most significant one being a violin player, Nadia, played by Eva Victor), memories of Alex’s egomaniac father (Hank Azaria), and reconnecting with his troubled brother, Andy (Will Arnett), another musician, now trying to make it as a podcaster.

Behemoth!, which just had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, is a much-anticipated new film from Tony Gilroy, director of Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy, and a prolific screenwriter. The resulting film is bound to charm many and would have been a viable candidate for an audience award if the festival had one. Herein lies the film’s biggest weakness: it skirts the line of overt crowd-pleasing so much that it keeps playing it entirely too safe at every turn.

With its ragged, almost fugue-like narrative, Gilroy’s film seems to be striving to hit the notes of the great classics, like Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, but ends up being more in the lane of last year’s NYFF participants - Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly and Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?. In other words, Behemoth! is also a painfully familiar story about a man going through an existential crisis of sorts, but without any tangible stakes or consequences at the end of his journey, no matter whether he succeeds or fails.

While Pedro Pascal talks about the challenges of playing a passive protagonist who isn’t really motivated by anything other than music, this is not what makes Alex such a difficult character to relate to. In a grand tradition not only of Fellini but also of Michelangelo Antonioni, having the protagonist be a passenger on their own journey opens endless creative possibilities. It's just that the path had better be at least somewhat engaging or amusing. Here, the path lies through a very particular version of reality, which is hard to describe in any other way than a male-centric fantasy.

In stories like this, the hero may experience some emotional discomfort, but it can never be too much – either for him or the audience; almost all women want to sleep with him, and even the supposedly tense situations always come down to something insignificant (at one point, Alex is chased by a couple of playful corgis). Even more disheartening is that this alternative world is populated with one-note stereotypes of characters.

There’s a douchey composer (Thomas Kretschmann), who comes in to spout insults. Will Arnett, who was the protagonist in Is This Thing On?, now plays Bradley Cooper’s role from that film – a lovable idiot, too oblivious to realize how ridiculous he sounds every time he opens his mouth. And it’s up for debate who gets it worse: Hank Azaria, who is relegated to one narcissistic monologue meant to reaffirm Alex’s family trauma, or Olivia Wilde, whose heroine is a bad caricature in outstanding outfits who only serves as a punchline in every scene she appears in – even though Wilde manages to sell it with her manic energy.

The only truly heartfelt constant here is the music, which is handled with real care and sensitivity, with parts of the film's remarkable score written by nine composers, including James Newton Howard, Henry Jackman, and Alan Silvestri. There is real beauty in the way the music leads the narrative, speaking different emotional tongues along the way.

In the end, it’s indisputable that Behemoth! is a film made with a lot of love for both music and cinema engraved in it. It’s just too bad that it's also a film that isn’t willing to take any risks when it comes to its human characters. Or canine ones, for that matter.