Behemoth: Every Day Is an Audition

Pedro Pascal in Tony Gilroy's Behemoth (2026). Photo: Searchlight Pictures

Behemoth (2026), written and directed by Tony Gilroy

Pedro Pascal plays Alex, a professional cellist who drifts from city to city and woman to woman, unable to commit or settle. His brother took the opposite road into rock and roll and tried to put down roots, with similar results. The story jumps back and forth in time, and one old love in particular keeps haunting him.

Gilroy's film is not a tragedy. It's a celebration of art that is honest about what art costs: sanity, family, stability. Alex is charming and magnetic, but he's also a man afraid of repeating the patterns of the men in his family. Pascal gets to show he's more than a heartthrob here, and I'd argue this is his best work. The film's thesis lands in a single line, when Alex tells a young cellist that he’s tutoring that every day is an audition, and that you're either a machine or a river and you'll know it when you feel it. The ending is powerful because it earns that idea.

It's a surprising left turn from the director of Michael Clayton, still one of the best films of the last 20 years. But Gilroy is in full control here, conducting these lives like an orchestra.