If you’re wondering whether an actual lion would behave in this manner, regardless of gender, the filmmakers have the question covered. Martin, the expert on hand, supplies a running commentary consisting largely of variations of: “Lions don’t do this”.

Having him harp on the point would be risky, if the goal were to make the story literally believable. But what Nate and the others are faced with is less a lion than a generic monster in a digital lion skin, hardly different in practice from the sharks and alligators employed for similar duties elsewhere.

Even visually, its narrow eyes and discoloured fur give it a mutant “off” quality, which appears less lifelike the closer we’re allowed to look. Kormakur often does best when he relies on low roars from offscreen, drawing heavily from Steven Spielberg’s playbook in the Jurassic Park films.

Also reminiscent of Spielberg is the showy way the camera circles the actors, which tends to be motion for its own sake, neither making us feel trapped alongside the heroes nor conveying anything about the lion’s point of view.

Again, almost the only factor that allows us to take the life-or-death situation even halfway seriously is Elba’s performance – though I’ll admit there were one or two moments when the unexpected sight of nearby danger made me gasp, not as easy a task as making me jump.

The rest is straightforward: Nate proves his manhood, the human baddies get their comeuppance, just enough genuine wildlife is glimpsed to reassure us the enemy was never nature as such. One curious footnote: Mogadime, a model making her screen debut, is reportedly several years younger than Halley, the 29-year-old playing her teenage daughter.

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Speaking of ambiguities to do with age, while there’s nothing in Beast to baffle viewers in the later years of primary school, stances will vary on whether it’s suitable for the whole family. It may depend on whether your children play a lot of video games, in which case they’re more likely to be comfortable with corpses and gruesome wounds.