It does rather feel as if the universe — or at least the French film industry — is trying to tell us something when 2023 has turned up not one but two loose Gallic adaptations of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” That 1903 novella was about a man, John Marcher, who fails to fully live his life because he’s seized by premonitions of catastrophe that never visibly come to pass. It feels glumly relevant in an age of climate change, artificial intelligence and other obvious but indefinite signals of human demise; perhaps we should count this highly specific cinematic mini-trend as another.

Spare a thought for director Patric Chiha’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” a Berlinale premiere earlier this year, with an already modest profile about to be dwarfed by Bertrand Bonello’s starrier, bigger-swinging “The Beast” — a gender-switched James riff in which said catastrophe is very much happening,...