Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! Divides NYFF Critics With 79% Rotten Tomatoes Score

Fourteen years after directing his last feature film, Tony Gilroy returned to the director’s chair with a project that deliberately avoids the pulse-pounding machinery of Hollywood thrillers.

The world premiere of Behemoth! at the 64th New York Film Festival on October 2, 2026, marked a sharp tonal shift for the filmmaker behind Michael Clayton and Andor. Rather than delivering a conventional narrative, Gilroy introduced an experimental musical drama that immediately divided critical consensus. The film holds a 79 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes across 14 reviews, having debuted at 85 percent, alongside a weighted average score of 73 out of 100 on Metacritic across 10 cataloged reviews.

Starring Pedro Pascal as Alex Serian, a renowned concert cellist retreating to Los Angeles after two decades on global concert stages, Behemoth! tracks a protagonist unmoored from his classical pedigree as he enters the high-pressure environment of Hollywood film scoring. Rather than following a linear timeline, the 122-minute feature unfolds through fractured, associative flashbacks where past domestic regrets collide with orchestral recording sessions.

Critical response to this temporal architecture divided major trade publications into opposing camps. Writing for IndieWire, chief film critic David Ehrlich awarded the film a B+ grade, defining it as a movingly atonal character study. Ehrlich observed that the production functions less as a celebration of cinematic scoring and more as an exploration of an artist searching for his own personal associations with memory, praising Gilroy for endowing the formal exercise with an unforced sense of discovery.

The film's ambition received even stronger backing from TheWrap, where critic Zachary Lee assigned a 9 out of 10 score, celebrating the drama as a strikingly original love letter to movie scores that visualizes internal grief when dialogue falls short.

Central to that sensory texture is an unprecedented musical framework. Instead of assigning the feature to a single composer, Gilroy and producers Sanne Wohlenberg and John Gilroy assembled the "Behemoth! Collective"—a dedicated ensemble of nine prominent Hollywood composers, including Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, and Alan Silvestri. Each composer crafted distinct sonic movements representing different psychological eras in Serian’s life, transforming the auditory track into the narrative backbone of the film.

Reviewing the production for Variety, Owen Gleiberman rated the film 7 out of 10, praising its playful handling of musical craftsmanship and its authentic look at recording soundstages. Gleiberman pointedly noted that the picture plays as an agile scherzo rather than a solemn symphonic monument.

Yet that same technical audacity drew sharp resistance from other festival reviewers. In The Hollywood Reporter, critic David Rooney assigned a 5 out of 10 rating, criticizing Gilroy's fussy hopscotching time structure and arguing that the passivity of Pascal's protagonist renders the emotional drama cold. While praising the film's visual elegance and its immersive Dolby Atmos audio mix, Rooney concluded that Behemoth! succeeds primarily as an acoustic showcase rather than a cohesive character study.

An even sharper dissent arrived from The Guardian, where critic Owen Myers awarded the film 2 out of 5 stars (a 4 out of 10 score). Myers dismissed the production as a forgettable exercise marred by stylistic gimmicks, arguing that Pascal's reserved performance provides a frustratingly insubstantial anchor for Gilroy's formal experiments.

Distributed by Searchlight Pictures, Behemoth! is scheduled for a wide theatrical release across the United States on December 4, 2026. The supporting cast rounds out Serian's personal circle with Olivia Wilde as his estranged former partner Carol, alongside Eva Victor, Will Arnett, and Hank Azaria.

As the film transitions from Alice Tully Hall to its winter theatrical rollout, key commercial parameters remain unresolved. Searchlight Pictures has yet to disclose initial domestic theater counts, and the studio has not confirmed whether the multi-composer score will receive a full physical or digital soundtrack distribution ahead of opening weekend.