Name: Behemoth!
Director: Tony Gilroy
Released: 2026-12-04T00:00:00+00:00
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, Will Arnett

Alex Serian, the cellist Pedro Pascal plays in Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, has spent his life looking up from the music stand and waiting for someone else’s baton to fall. The first reviews out of the New York Film Festival agree on almost everything about him. Where they part is the one question the film is built on: can a man who never decides carry a film by a director whose work has always turned on people forced to act?

The headline everyone has run is the cello, and it holds. Variety’s critic, who grew up a classical musician and admits a low tolerance for actors miming the instrument, writes that it really is Pascal playing, and that Gilroy fixed the genre’s most familiar flaw by having his star learn. The hands, then, are settled. The stillness above them is not.

Gilroy, who wrote the film as well as directing it, draws Alex as a prodigy who was never asked what he wanted. He is a third-generation musician, groomed so early that he played on The Tonight Show as a six-year-old, a detail both Variety and IndieWire single out. He fled Los Angeles for the symphony circuit, Chicago above all, and drifted between orchestras, cities and women. The film brings him home because his mother, played by JoBeth Williams, is slipping into dementia, and it puts him to work as a session player, recording scores for other people’s movies, one of them a secret blockbuster code-named Behemoth!.

Each cue sends him backwards. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich describes the music as a portal: the percussion for a chase in an action-comedy returns Alex to a Chicago gala he tried to slip out of, away from a married lover played by Olivia Wilde; a waltz for a romance takes him to Dallas and an affair with Nadia, a violinist played by Eva Victor. The pattern Ehrlich reads is plain to everyone but Alex, a man drawn to strong, unavailable women and gone the moment they ask for permanence. In his mentor’s chair, Alex tells a young cellist, in a line the same review quotes, to pick a lane and commit, because the music comes alive when you make a decision. It is advice he has never taken himself.

This is where Gilroy turns form into argument. A session musician plays music written for images he did not choose, under a baton he does not hold, and the film adopts that grammar. As Variety describes it, an orchestra records a cue and, seconds later, the same music becomes the score of Behemoth! itself. Nine film composers, among them James Newton Howard, Alan Silvestri and Michael Giacchino, are billed together as the Behemoth! Collective. A hero who lives inside other people’s soundtracks gets a film whose soundtrack has no single author.

Read side by side, the reviews describe the same performance with opposite verbs. The Daily Beast’s Nick Schager calls it the most nuanced and soulful work of Pascal’s career. SlashFilm’s Jeremy Mathai says Pascal has finally found a leading role that actually suits him. Ehrlich calls the performance real and recessive, a portrait that declines to explain what Alex feels about art and money. Variety sees the identical restraint and counts it against the film: Pascal, its review says, suffers in such a placid way that we keep wanting more, and the time-jumping structure, which Variety links to the elliptical quality of Tár, sometimes leaves the order of events hard to read.

The split runs back through Gilroy’s own filmography. His standing rests on Michael Clayton and on Andor, which Ehrlich sums up as an uncompromising political thriller about the sacrifice a rebellion demands. Behemoth! is the opposite wager, a protagonist whose drama is the decision he keeps postponing. Variety’s conclusion that, nineteen years after Michael Clayton, Gilroy is still looking for a subject equal to it is partly a verdict on that wager. Ehrlich’s answer is the ending, which he calls a dolcissimo stunner and the moment the film finally takes its own advice.

The role was not written around Pascal. Oscar Isaac was attached when the project was announced and had left by the time Pascal was confirmed; David Harbour was cast and then exited over his Stranger Things commitments, with Will Arnett taking over as Alex’s brother, a podcaster. That history gives SlashFilm’s line about a role that finally suits Pascal a stranger edge: the part fits him because of everything it asks him not to do.

Behemoth! premiered on October 2 as the Centerpiece selection of the 64th New York Film Festival. It is Gilroy’s fourth feature as director and his first since The Bourne Legacy in 2012. Searchlight Pictures opens it in US theaters on December 4, with Hank Azaria as Alex’s father and Matthew Lillard, Margarita Levieva and Alexa Swinton in the cast.

The film asks its hero to stop waiting for the stick. Its critics are now asking the same of its star, and the only answer Gilroy gives either of them is a cello Pascal actually learned to play.