Alex Serian has spent his whole life inside other people's music. As a child he was a cello prodigy, pushed onto national television before he could tie his own shoes. As an adult he spent two decades drifting between elite symphony orchestras, and between women he never quite let himself love. Now he is back in Los Angeles, the city of his famous musical family, sitting in a scoring studio and playing cues for Hollywood movies, one of them a secret blockbuster codenamed Behemoth! Written and directed by Tony Gilroy, the filmmaker behind Michael Clayton and Andor, Behemoth! stars Pedro Pascal as Alex, alongside Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, Will Arnett, Alexa Swinton, Kaya Ralls, JoBeth Williams, and Hank Azaria. Its central device is as clever as it is musical: every score Alex records pulls him back into a memory, so the soundtrack of other people's films becomes the soundtrack of his own past. Nine major film composers, credited together as The Behemoth! Collective, wrote that music. What emerges is a portrait of a man who has always been talented enough to hide, and the one question that finally forces him to stop running.
ACT I: A CHILDHOOD SCORED BY OTHER PEOPLE
The Serian name is Hollywood musical royalty, and the family's legends are written in sound. Alex's grandfather, a trumpeter, died of a stroke moments after hitting a high C on the very MGM soundstage where Alex will one day record. His father, Peter, a French horn player turned composer, made a living writing music for a 1960s cartoon called Happy & Slappy. He resented the work but happily cashed the residual checks. His mother, Ginnie, was a celebrated harpist. Alex was the prodigy. Home videos show him as a six-year-old playing Bach on Johnny Carson's late-night show, a career born more from his father's dissatisfaction than from his own childhood dreams. His older brother, Andy, a violist with more modest gifts, eventually abandoned classical music for a short-lived 1990s rock band. Alex learned early to give people exactly what they wanted while keeping himself out of reach.
StarringPedro Pascal, David Harbour, Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor
ACT II: TWENTY YEARS ON THE ROAD
Alex leaves Los Angeles and spends twenty years playing in prestigious orchestras in Boston, Dallas, and Chicago. In Dallas in 2010, he begins a passionate affair with Nadia Hynes, a brilliant violinist and perhaps the only woman he truly loves. Nadia, however, is committed to another man, the wealthy Dennis Glenn, and she breaks things off with Alex to marry him. She becomes pregnant, and the father of her daughter, Viviana, is never openly acknowledged.
Six years later, in 2016, Alex learns that Nadia has died young, and he travels to her funeral. There he meets Viviana, now a six-year-old who sits at the piano and performs an original requiem of breathtaking maturity. Alex is shaken, and a quiet, unsettling thought takes hold of him: Viviana might be his daughter. Even at the funeral, old habits surface, as he slips into a tryst with a married friend from Nadia's circle with whom he shares a history.
Alex's next stop is the Chicago Symphony, where he makes the worst decision of his career. He begins sleeping with Carol Spedding, a wealthy, married patron of the arts who once gave six million dollars to the orchestra. When Alex tries to end the affair, Carol refuses to let go. Her obsession curdles into something close to stalking, and she starts turning up wherever he tries to hide. Alex announces that he is leaving Chicago to care for his mother, who is declining from Alzheimer's back in Los Angeles. It is true, but it is also an escape hatch.
ACT III: HOME, BUT NOT AT PEACE
Back in Los Angeles, Alex walks into the scoring studios and is greeted by old colleagues as if he had never left. He moves in with Ginnie, whose dementia has erased her memory of him. Carol, meanwhile, tracks him down even here, and one of the film's liveliest sequences sets his frantic attempts to dodge her against a spy-thriller score called Spies Don't Run.
Alex reconnects with Andy, who now hosts a podcast celebrating the Serian family legacy and their father's television themes. The brothers clearly love each other, but Andy is bad with money and stuck in an unhappy marriage. Their tension boils over when Alex discovers that Andy sold their late father's harps without telling him, and again when they argue over where their mother should eventually be laid to rest. Andy wants her beside the ex-husband she loved but who betrayed her. One of their scuffles plays out, darkly and comically, to their father's old cartoon music.
Something in Alex is shifting, though. He takes a young cellist named Bronte under his wing, coaching her for an audition with the San Francisco Symphony and urging her to choose a direction and commit to it, advice he has never followed himself. His protective, paternal instincts are waking up. A car accident that leaves him miraculously unhurt reveals how he still copes: his only real concern is the condition of his cello.
THE CLIMAX: THE BEHEMOTH! SESSIONS AND THE PATERNITY HUNT
The question of Viviana has never left him. While Alex records the score for the top-secret Behemoth! blockbuster, the music carries the film into one of his most absurd memories: posing as a waiter at a party so he can sneak into a mansion and steal a used toothbrush as a DNA sample for a paternity test. The sequence plays like a heist movie, scored with full blockbuster bombast.
Viviana, now fifteen, has become a genuine star, turning internet fame into pop-culture success through her extraordinary talent. Then she is hired to take over the score of a major studio film from a temperamental European composer. Alex lands a seat as a cellist on that very project. After one session, Viviana asks him to stay behind and help her work on a piece. Alone in the studio, she plays piano and he plays cello, and for the first time in the film, Alex pours his heart out the only way he knows how: through his instrument.
THE FINAL RESOLUTION: A CHOICE THAT COSTS HIM
In the film's closing stretch, Alex finally allows himself to grieve, not only for the people he has lost but for the life and love he never had. Then he makes a decision of his own. It is a choice that hurts him, but one that may give another person a better life. The final performance, built around a piece composed by James Newton Howard, feels for once like Alex is playing for himself rather than for someone else. Gilroy keeps the ending deliberately modest and gentle, closing on emotional honesty rather than spectacle, and it quietly recasts everything that came before it.
CRITICAL REVIEW & ANALYSIS
Behemoth! is built like a piece of music rather than a conventional story. Gilroy and his brother John, who edited the film, cut between decades in deliberately staccato rhythms, letting each new score Alex records open a door into the past. When the device works, it is exhilarating: a stalker sequence becomes a spy thriller, a sibling brawl becomes a cartoon, and a DNA theft becomes a heist. The scenes inside Hollywood's scoring stages offer a rare, loving look at the session musicians whose work most audiences never notice.
The trade-off is momentum. The hopscotching structure can stall the drama, and because Alex is so often a spectator in his own life, some viewers will find him hard to reach. Pedro Pascal makes that distance work. His performance is restrained and inward, and the months he spent learning the cello pay off in scenes where Alex plays for reasons he cannot put into words. Olivia Wilde steals every scene as the unstoppable Carol, Will Arnett brings unexpected tenderness to Andy, and newcomer Kaya Ralls, a real cellist, is entirely natural as Bronte.
Thematically, the film draws a sharp line between a prodigy, who can play anything put in front of him, and a genius, who creates something new. Alex knows which one he is. The ending, which some critics find too tidy, lands as a quiet act of growth from a man who finally stops performing for others.
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