Heart of the Beast opens in theaters on Friday, 25 September, two weeks from now. The survival thriller reunites director David Ayer with Brad Pitt for the first time since 2014's Fury, twelve years after the pair first worked together.
The film strands Special Forces officer James Belmont, played by Pitt, in the Alaskan wilderness after a plane crash, with only his retired combat dog Odin for company. J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe round out the cast, and the trailers have leaned as heavily on Uber, the dog performing Odin, as they have on Pitt himself.
Despite the Alaskan setting, none of it was actually shot there. Ayer took his cast and crew to New Zealand's South Island instead, filming across Queenstown, Glenorchy, Mt Aspiring National Park and Milford Sound. Some locations were reachable only by helicopter, and Ayer has argued that the terrain passes so convincingly for Alaska that audiences will not be able to tell the difference.
The screenplay comes from first-time feature writer Cameron Alexander, whose script circulated as far back as 2017, when it landed on that year's Black List of the best unproduced screenplays. Nearly a decade later it is his debut as a produced screenwriter, and the producing credits behind it are an unusual mix for a survival thriller: Pitt produces alongside Damien Chazelle and Olivia Hamilton's Wild Chickens Productions, the label behind Chazelle's own directing work, which puts a group better known for music and drama behind a physical, elements-against-man story.
Before the wide release, the film premieres out of competition at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, which runs from 18 to 26 September, with Pitt and Ayer expected to attend. The festival slot will be the first public test of the question the marketing has not answered: whether the film balances its survival mechanics with the bond between man and dog at its center, or leans entirely on the latter.
