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‘Behemoth!’ With Pedro Pascal at NYFF 2026
How long does it take to work through one’s upbringing and create one’s own identity? Can one ever get off the train of unreconciled emotions and take control instead of playing the passive voyeur? Writer/director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) answers these questions by investigating Alex Serian’s (Pedro Pascal) life in Behemoth!. The comedic drama made its World Premiere as the Centerpiece film at the 64th NYFF.
With a superb performance that only Pascal can give, Behometh! draws in its audience with vignettes scored by nine of the industry’s stellar composers. Uniquely constructed like a symphony with movements, the film explores seminal moments in the cellist’s familial and romantic life. Each composer scores a different vignette/scene. Threaded together the scenes represent dramatic turning points key to Alex’s emotional upheaval in a flashback retrospective. Cleverly, Gilroy intercuts these events with Alex’s present. In a fascinating twist, the music, like a defining character, reveals Alex’s emotional and mental state during the various vignettes.
Initially, Gilroy shows Alex in Los Angeles where he joins the orchestra on a sound stage and meets old friends to record Hollywood film scores. There, we discover he also must resolve family business because his mother has dementia and can’t adequately care for herself. In the present while Alex plays film scores, Alex flashes back to the past in his mind, his loves, family arguments, his regrets. Indeed, he attempts to reconcile his emotional angst through his vigorous playing. Ironically, the film the Hollywood orchestra scores syncs with events in Alex’s remembrances. In parallel when he plays the film scores, he superimposes them on his memories. In effect he scores his own life in Behemoth! whose title symbolizes not only himself but a new family member.
With care Gilroy intercuts Alex playing the exciting, dramatic, calm, frightening music from the film scores in the present with Alex’s chaotic past. Thus, Behemoth!’s narrative can’t be linear. It follows the music he plays as the engineers record the film scores on the LA soundstage and the remembered events his mind reconstructs. In the flashback vignettes/scenes, we learn why Alex escaped to LA. Alex left his position with an orchestra in Chicago to escape a disastrous affair with the obsessed wife of the orchestra’s philanthropist.
A terrific and terrifying Olivia Wilde stalks and haunts Alex in a masterful portrayal of a privileged woman who never takes “no”for an answer. With humor and horror, Wilde’s Alex-possessed character runs amuck to keep Alex as hers. Instead of pressing charges for her stalking, or getting a court order against her, Alex runs away, an ineffectual response. Gilroy has her unexpectedly pop up, sometimes with shock and awe. The accompanying music to the frantic scenes of Alex running from her and from other situations expresses his panic and fear. Gilroy’s rapid editing and close-ups of Alex/Pascal’s face as he escapes draw in the audience to his personal inner struggle.
During various flashbacks, we learn about Alex’s identity as a former child prodigy from an old video clip friends watch when he performed on the Johnny Carson show as a kid. Apparently, music centers his life but he lives in the shadow of a storied musical family. His emotional chaos has him travel as an itinerant cellist, escaping to different cities and women. Thus, this state distracts him from his true potential. His abilities, characterized by love Nadia Hynes (Eva Victor) as a ” monster,” he should realize. However, he doesn’t. Thus, Nadia packs up and leaves their relationship after calling him out for his passivity and unreliability. However, theirs turns out to be a key relationship which Gilroy reveals at the conclusion as a surprise.
During the collection of original music compositions for Behemoth!, we understand that the music accompanies and comments upon Alex’s desire for balance and peace from his torments. Additionally, it resonates with beauty, for Alex receives healing and redemption from the music that builds to an epiphany. The nine composers include Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, Brandon Roberts and Alan Silvestri. Additionally, NYFF 2026 featured excerpts from the score during intervals in festival moments.
Gilroy’s Behemoth! celebrates the power of music in a love letter to those who make music and uplift our souls. Recognizing the nine composers of the film, their work highlights an incredible score which should be nominated for awards. Additionally, the ensemble work by Eva Victor, Alexa Swinton, Will Arnett and others helps to make this unique, elegant film by Gilroy a standout.
Behemoth! will screen in select theaters beginning on December 4, 2026. For the NYFF schedule see possible release of tickets on their site https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2026/films/behemoth/
‘Is This Thing On’ Bradley Cooper’s Third film @63rd NYFF
Comedy and tragedy masks couple side by side for a reason. Bradley Cooper’s third (A Star is Born, Maestro) directorial outing, Is This Thing On?, adds meaning to the notion that misery loves comedy. Will Arnett and Laura Dern play a couple whose separation leads to catharsis and regeneration when Alex turns to comedy to lighten his soul’s unhappiness. Is This Thing On? a World Premiere in the Main Slate section of the 63rd New York Film Festival, screened as the festival closing night film.
Cooper incisively shepherds the intimate and naturalistic performances of Will Arnett (Alex) and Laura Dern (Tessa). The actors portray a long-time married couple. In the opening film scene both agree without fireworks and fanfare (while Tessa brushes her teeth) to call “it” (their marriage thing) off.
Throwing the typical divorce sequences out the window, Cooper skips to the aftermath of the separation and Alex and Tessa’s amicability. First, they split custody of their two 10-year-old sons, played with sharp comedic timing by Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten. Secondly, after the opening shot of agreeing about “it,” we note by the next time they get together with their couple friends (Andra Day & Cooper, Sean Hayes & Scott Icenogle) Alex moved into an apartment in New York City. Meanwhile, Tessa remains in their house with their playful Labradoodles and sorrowful sons who comment that their parents argued a lot.
One evening instead of going home to his empty, lonely apartment after seeing Tessa and friends, Alex saves a few bucks cover charge by adding his name to the open mic list of a basement comedy club (The Comedy Cellar). As a possible joke on himself, Alex sheepishly takes the mic. However, when he spontaneously, unabashedly, surprisingly vomits out personal information about his marriage, a lot of it morose, some of it funny, the last thing the self-loathing Alex imagines, then happens. He gets a few laughs and lots of encouragement from the crowd of wannabe comedians.
In a fantastic twist, Cooper cast many of these real-life comics as audience members. Their authentic jumble of responses picked up by sound designers works to create the naturalistic environment where Alex slowly recharges his deadened mojo.
A guy can get used to this shot of adrenaline to stave off his soul’s sickness. Maybe if he returns a few times, he can reveal to himself what the hell happened emotionally and psychically that caused him to end up alone, without his wife and kids on the doomed path to divorce. If expiation indeed softens a crusty-edged, hardened, sad sack, perhaps more spilling of his guts will be the medicine he needs to ameliorate the hell within.
Thus, the initial few laughs and non judgmental camaraderie of fellow comic wannabes trigger Alex to return for another open mic night. And once more, Alex’s self-abasing confessions to himself and the crowd magically lift his spirits. Alex’s serendipitous impulse not to take his inner angst to heart blossoms. As he evolves his comedic timing and content, he resolves he can become a better person through confessional stand-up comedy. There’s nothing like getting in touch with one’s inner hell via artful performance, where self-reflection brings about self-correction.
Alternating scenes, Alex’s new revelatory jokes at the comedy club, with Tessa and friends meet-ups, we note the gradual change in Alex’ emotions and moods. Even his friend Balls (Cooper in a funny, facially hirsute turn), tells him that maybe he will divorce his wife (the beautiful Andra Day) following Alex’s route, because he seems happier unmarried.
This revolutionary way to deal with divorce among a community of comics really happened to British stand up comedian John Bishop. The true events inspired the script by Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell with some of the uneven dialogue prompted by extemporaneous ad libs by the cast.
Interestingly, Alex’s wayward jokes that don’t land had to be worked on by Will Arnett and Cooper. In a Q and A after the screening Cooper grinned when he said that Arnett’s humor out-shined Alex’s and had to be tamped down. Thus, the jokes never flow seamlessly like a professional’s patter since Alex must find his way through trial and error. Likewise, Alex and Tessa’s relationship which took a hairpin turn with their break up, takes another when Tessa goes on a friend/date (with Peyton Manning) in a cute set-up for the possibility of her first sexual encounter after the split.
Where do they show up? At the comedy club where Alex hits a new high/low discussing his first sexual encounter after his break-up. What did he learn from the sex? He tells the audience in a heartfelt moment he missed his wife. Pleasantly surprised and turned on to hear that Alex missed her, Tessa confronts Alex about his “letting it all hang out” riff at the club. Though Tessa’s appearance at the club with her date smacks of contrivance, the coincidence is delicious for the next plot twist. This hearkens back to the film’s title. Finding their attraction to each other rekindled, do they or don’t they get back together? When and where the answer arrives adds hilarity to their tenuous situation.
Importantly, their dead-ended relationship moved off its axis opening up new possibilities. Finally, they communicate their feelings beyond arguing. And just as Alex has found a new trajectory and hope with his comedy club appearances, Tessa returns to her love of volleyball as a former Olympic player, sharing her skills and expertise as a professional coach.
Meanwhile, Alex’s parents (Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds) weigh in with their opinions, though they refuse to choose sides to keep the peace. In targeting the complexity of human relationships, Cooper shows the difficulties in letting go of an old, tired relationship stuck in destructive grooves. Also, he mines the ground of rebuilding a relationship and setting it in another positive direction. With that reconstruction also comes the rebuilding of identity and self-worth if they couple uses the opportunity of a break to begin a renewal.
Dern and Arnett are terrific surrounded by a great supporting cast. These include the actors mentioned above and additionally Amy Sedaris and New York stand up standbys for example Reggie Conquest, Jordan Jensen, Chlore Radcliffe. These comedians help to make the film a love letter to New York and its downtown scene.
For the description of Is This Thing On? at the 63rd NYFF go to their website. https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff/films/is-this-thing-on/ The film will be released December 19th.
