Lions, sharks, divorce: Survival films keep trying to pull emotion from carnage – do we care?

In ‘Beast’, an absent father finds himself in the lion’s den. It’s the latest survival flick whose hero works through personal troubles facing a life-or-death situation. Geoffrey Macnab looks at the potential for emotional depth behind superficial thrills

Idris Elba comes to face to face with a lion in Baltasar Kormákur’s ‘Beast’ (Universal)

Imagine this: you’re staring through your windscreen at a ravenous Barbary lion who very much wants to put your head between its jaws. Things get worse. You’ve foolishly left the passenger window open. The animal is now trying to squeeze its way into your vehicle. You’re kicking at its mane and mouth while it snaps and swipes at your ankles and legs, ripping the cloth of your trousers and turning your skin into a mosaic of red.

This is the predicament Idris Elba finds himself in early on in his new film Beast, out this week. The lion in question has gone “rogue” because poachers have killed its pride. It will devour any human it can find. If Elba’s character, Dr Nate Samuels, doesn’t show any particular sign of terror, it’s because the lion is perhaps a welcome distraction from the wrath of his teenage daughters. He split up from their mother shortly before she contracted terminal cancer, and the girls blame him for not being there when they needed him most. “My dad is not much of a hugger,” one daughter observes with withering contempt. Nate may not be the touchy-feely type but he can now redeem himself by keeping his kids out of the lion’s way.

Beast, directed by Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur, is the latest in a very long line of survival thrillers in which extreme danger has a cathartic as well as a destructive effect. As Elba recently explained on a US chat show, the film is really about “the beast of mourning, the beast of family ties and how that all comes together”. When Nate bandages up his child, there is a symbolic weight to his actions. The hurt here is as much psychological as it is physical.