Beatrice is a Harrowing Look at Inhumanity, Both Overt and Subtle
Beatrice (Louise Heller) is in such a state of despair and overwhelm that her head has gone “light”, as she describes it. “Like, if I get any more bad news, it’s over….my days seem dark and numbered.” She is speaking to Tom (Jorge Carrion Alvarez), a pharmaceutical scientist considering her for a study to monitor the effects of antidepressant medication.
Beatrice has lost what she calls “that coffee feeling”—the excitement of that first sip of life in the morning. “Not being able to find pleasure is a form of death,” she astutely observes. Her anhedonia is accompanied by the feeling that she’s become a burden to others. “No one wants to hear me.” And then things take a surreal turn, as a group of women, barefoot in beige sweaters and nun habits, appear to serenade us. “Swine swine, put it down” they chant operatically, and ominously. “God strike you…strike you down.” These opening moments set the vibe for Beatrice, a beautiful, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking treatise on the human condition.
Beatrice’s experience with Tom is adversarial: She does not trust him or anyone, and understandably so—we eventually learn that Beatrice is a Holocaust survivor. And—chillingly in light of that fact—Tom refers to her as “Patient Number 12” (and often doesn’t even get the number right).
Sensing the emptiness in him, Beatrice defiantly challenges him: “When you go home at night, is there someone there waiting for you?” Changing the subject, Tom casually rejects her as a candidate for the clinical study, suggesting she is “not depressed enough.”
“We prefer to have people who have already been on antidepressants,” he notes, invoking the “we won’t give you the experience because you’ve never had the experience” Catch-22. “I did mushrooms once!” quips Beatrice. When Tom won’t budge, and his explanations only expose the callousness of the whole operation, she goes for the jugular. “You work for a pharmaceutical company, and I bet there’s a wealthy corporation behind it.” She cites the Nuremberg code, the set of ethical guidelines for human experimentation, driving home the horror that the atrocities Beatrice endured in the past still exist, in a more covert but just as morally reprehensible form.
“Judgment, judgment, judgment!” chant a chorus of disembodied voices.
“Would your study be any different?” asks Beatrice.
He’s about to have security throw Beatrice out, but then Tom notices the Auschwitz stamp on her arm. He displays a sick excitement, realizing that this revelation will give him the go-ahead to experiment on her after all.
From there things take an even more chaotic turn for Tom, as his own life begins to spiral. The tone remains fittingly dark, in both the increasingly ironic circumstances and in the deftly placed humor amid the horror, as the unfolding events turn ever more absurd.
The musical interludes underscorethe reality of the situation as they comment and condemn, giving even more weight to the nightmarish proceedings. There is no learning from history, just an endless cycle of inhumanity, cruelty for a profit disguised as medicinal and scientific progress.
Adroitly written and powerfully directed by Wendy Biller, with gorgeous music by Caroline Hawthorne, Beatrice is a powerful condemnation of the cruelty and hate that continues to appear time again over the course of human history—sometimes overt, sometimes too subtle for anyone to notice until it’s too late. We mourn, regret, forget, and the cycle repeats.
inDfilm 