Beast‘s ending brings the movie to a wild conclusion of man versus animal. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, Beast stars Idris Elba as a man vacationing in South Africa with his two young daughters. However, while out exploring the beautiful scenery, the family is attacked and hunted by a vicious lion gone rogue. The film is a survival thriller at its heart, packed with action, suspense, and a final battle between Elba’s character and the vengeful lion out for blood.

Beast‘s ending finds Nate and his daughters attempting to take refuge in a schoolhouse, only for the lion to track them there. Wanting to ensure his daughters have a chance of escaping, Nate lures the rogue lion out to an area where he saw a pride of lions the day before. In front of the other beasts, Nate and the rogue lion do battle, with the lion viciously mauling him before the other lions step in and take down the out-of-control animal. Despite his injuries, Nate survives thanks to the arrival of Banji, an employee of the reserve, and he reunites with his daughters.

The Lion’s Revenge Plot Reveals Beast’s True Villains

The Lion’s Motivations Are Revenge Against The Villainous Humans

While Beast‘s story sets up the lion as the primary antagonist, the poachers who went after it at the start of the film are the true villains. If the poachers hadn’t been hunting to kill the pride of the rogue lion, the big cat would not have sought revenge on them to begin with. The poachers represent a very real-life problem that sees such groups hunting, capturing, and killing wild animals illegally.

The poachers in the survival thriller were trespᴀssing on the game preserve, seeking the lions to kill, and likely selling their skin, bones, and other body parts on the black market. The lion’s revenge also showcases how, when provoked, wild animals can and will fight back against those who harm them.

Why Nate Fought The Lion In Front Of Another Pride

Nate’s Risky Plan Explained

Early on in Beast, Martin mentioned that the male lions would do whatever it took to protect their pride from an external threat. It was the law of the jungle. Out of options, Nate realized he had to take a chance by luring the rogue lion in front of the pride. He knew that the other two lions would eventually see the other big cat as a major threat to their pride. Wanting nothing more than to protect their pride, the lions face off against one another in a deathly match, shifting the rogue lion’s focus away from Nate once and for all.

It’s a clever plan that pits the animals against each other in their natural habitat, one that doesn’t involve humans. Historically, male lions have fought each other over pride domination. Typically, the male lions protect their pride while the female lions hunt. Nomadic male lions might wander into another pride and take over, killing the other male lions and any of their cubs to reproduce with the females themselves. In Beast, the lions rise to the fight because they see their rogue counterpart as a threat that might take over their pride and kill them.

Nate’s Dreams Explained: Why He Kept Seeing His Wife

Guilt Weights On Nate

Throughout the survival thriller, Nate dreams of his wife. In his dreams, Nate was often in search of her but couldn’t find her. When he was close, he would wake up, startled by what he’d just seen. It’s possible Nate kept dreaming of his wife because of his remorse. He blamed himself for not seeing the signs of her illness sooner, especially as he’s a doctor.

What’s more, Nate is always heard asking his wife where she is. It’s likely these dreams are meant to reveal his state of mind to the audience, as well as foreshadow what’s to come. Nate wants to find his wife throughout Beast because he feels lost, out of his depth when it comes to his family and their trip, and worried that he’ll never be able to make amends.

In the final dream, however, Nate finds his wife, who tells him that everything is going to be okay. This particular dream references his relief at being reunited with his family, whereas all of his previous dreams were filled with worry and a sense of anxiousness. The dreams ultimately foreshadowed that, despite Nate’s feelings of unease, things were going to get tough, but would turn out in his family’s favor.

What Beast’s Ending Really Means

Nate Confronts His Past In The Final Fight

Nate going toe-to-toe with the lion at the end of Beast is a metaphor for facing his past. Throughout the survival movie, Nate is forced to reckon with not only the fact that he couldn’t be there for his wife while she was sick, but that he didn’t see the signs of her illness before it was too late. By not being able to protect his wife, Nate also felt he had failed his daughters. Her blamed himself for the turmoil Mer and Norah were feeling about their mother’s death and his leaving them behind.

By battling the lion, Nate is able to make some sort of peace with himself and his perceived failures. He was also able to protect his daughters, an act he couldn’t complete before because he left his family behind. Nate essentially sacrifices himself to save Mer and Norah from the lion. Nate knew he was taking a risk, but he also knew that he was the only person who could step up to protect his family. In many ways, fighting the great lion was his chance at redemption.

He had to face the trauma of his past that was represented in the lion, which followed him wherever he went. Nate was not safe until he confronted the rogue lion at the end of Beast. It was the only way he was able to move forward with a clean conscience, shedding his past mistakes to be there for his family in a way he wasn’t able to before the events of the film.

How The Beast Ending Was Received

Critics Debated The Over-The-Top Ending

Beast was met with mixed reviews from critics when it was released and the movie’s wild ending seems to encapsulate the debate over how effective the overall story was. Many ᴅᴇᴀᴅly animal movies aren’t accurate and go more for entertainment, which could be said of Beast. However, it mixes grounded elements and real characters with some outrageous aspects, especially in the ending. That balance seems to be key to enjoying the finale, as the Chicago Tribune’s review favorably compared the brutality of the showdown between Nate and the lion to another survival movie:

The climax suggests a warm-weather equivalent to the bear attack in “The Revenant.” If that’s your thing, this may be, too.

Other reviews were not as impressed with the ending as some felt it betrayed the tone of the rest of the movie. The review in The Guardian highlighted the moment of Idris Elba punching the lion in the face, something that was heavily advertised in the trailers. However, they argue that, as fun as the moment seemed in the trailers, Beast presents a much more serious movie than that image suggests and by the time that moment arrives in the ending, it feels silly:

The final trailer for Beast reached similar virality after showing us the sight of Elba punching a lion… and while yes we do see it and yes it makes a bit more sense in a less serious-minded movie, it’s also a little too far, tainting an ending that feels anticlimactic and rushed. It’s a “moment” for sure and might be a rousing one for some, but it didn’t work for me, pushing the film into a realm of ultra-silliness that it had managed to avoid before that.

However, the review from Variety does a good job of summing up Beast’s combination of tones, acknowledging that the ending is not a realistic conclusion to this story, but suggesting that the rest of the movie allows for some embellishments in the end:

The ending is ludicrous, and yet it works because of all that Elba has invested in making this protective papa convincing. That’s the beauty of “Beast”: The lion may look fake, but the stakes feel real.