Subconscious Cruelty

One day, all the windows in the City disappeared... Then the rain started... No matter what people tried, nothing could stop the water. Soon, disease spread, robbing people's abilities to speak; the endless rain killing all other forms of communication with its acidic torrent. This was a time when dialogue became a new challenge. When everything we knew had to be reinvented. This was also a time, in the midst of a chaotic, decaying environment, when a man tried to cope with the loss of his former lover.

Down a seedy city street in her neighborhood, young Enola Penny is obsessed with what appears to be a long abandoned theatre. One night, she sees that the front door is slightly ajar and impulsively decides to sneak inside. But there in the dark, decrepit auditorium, a show unlike any other unfolds before her eyes. Its host is an eerie human puppet named Peg Poett who will introduce Penny to six tales of the bizarre: A couple traveling in a remote part of the French Pyrenees cross paths with a lustful witch; A paranoid lover faces the wrath of a partner who has been pushed to her limit; The Freudian dreams of an unfaithful husband blur the lines between fantasy and reality; The horrors of the real world are interpreted through the mind of a child; A woman addicted to other people's memories gets her fix through the vitreous fluid of her victims' eyeballs; And a perverse obsession with sweets turns sour for a couple in too deep.

La Belle Bête is a powerful study of the conflict between beauty and ugliness, hate and love. The story revolves around three main characters. At the center, Patrice, a beautiful but mindless youth stands gazing at his image in the water. Around him move his ugly sister Isabelle-Marie, and his frivolous mother Louise, the first lost in love and hate for her brother's beauty, the second seeing it as an adornment for herself. Into this small, obsessed universe come a blind boy and an elegant fop from the outside world. At once, the pattern breaks and events move forward into a terrifying denouement.