Taking Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast In The Jungle as his starting point and incorporating modern anxieties about human obsolescence, French director Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) has fashioned a shapeshifting, sinister and persistently intriguing romance. If it doesn’t feel fully realised, The Beast is, at the very least, magnificently ambitious.

Léa Seydoux is Gabrielle, who we meet in 1910, 2014 and 2044 as a pianist, aspiring actress and lost soul, respectively. In the latest of these time periods (an AI-dominated dystopia), she’s offered the chance to purify her DNA and rid herself of strong feelings in a process that involves revisiting her past lives. George MacKay plays the man she loves, Louis, who appears in several guises (from respectable gentleman to murderous incel), and who always seems out of reach. As Gabrielle confesses to him in 1910, she is plagued by the notion that she’s in some sort of terrible danger, a threat that pursues her through time.

Although The Beast is atmospheric, stylish and well-acted enough for you to buy into its portentousness, it suffers from occasional misjudgements (a pair of sequences involving pigeons spring to mind). The story may not be completely coherent, but Bonello delivers an avalanche of ideas. His film haunts and enthrals, as it moves from period drama to unsettling sci-fi to home-invasion thriller, featuring a Poseidon Adventure-evoking disaster-movie moment, and some Lynchian weirdness along the way.

MacKay is an astonishingly versatile actor (compare Pride and the recent Femme for further evidence of his range), something that Bonello exploits brilliantly here. But it’s Seydoux who holds our attention over the film’s substantial, slightly unwieldy duration; the actress is typically seductive and appropriately strange, while her conviction provides the glue.

The Beast is in cinemas from Friday 31 May; main picture: Carole Bethuel.