The Beast Within (2024)

Score: 1.5 / 5

I love werewolf movies. My favorite monster can take most any form, and I'll dig it. But The Beast Within, the sophomore feature from Alexander J. Farrell (I've not seen his other work), comes as close as I've ever been to actively disliking a werewolf movie. Its aims, arguably admirable, are to seduce viewers into a horror film that focuses on an isolated rural family -- father, mother, daughter -- and their strange rituals. The daughter, apparently kept out of the nighttime events, becomes curious and learns that their family is subject to a curse whereby dear old daddy must repress a raging beast within his body and spirit. It's contemporary rural Gothic, bleak and gritty, and I was excited to dive in.

Unfortunately, that's where its good ideas dwindle. The actors are all mediocre at best, though the daughter, Willow (Caoilinn Springall), is worth watching. Of course, she's also handicapped by her illness, which requires her to lug around an oxygen tank, which just feels too obvious a trope to be taken seriously these days. And of course it becomes her weapon and tool of liberation eventually, which almost made me turn off the film. Kit Harrington as the titular father/beast Noah often looks bored or confused while attempting to be menacing, and his character is somewhat sexualized, which is simply uncomfortable. He's the one with the disease threatening to rend their family ties, not she. Ashleigh Cummings plays the mother, Imogen, without much inspiration or impression.

Dreamlike editing and cinematography often mobilize a werewolf film, but the quality of this particular picture is so visually dark as to be often inscrutable. Worse, the half-world fantasy elements do not add to the theming or atmosphere (as in something like Pan's Labyrinth or even Antlers, which would be a closer comparison point) but rather obfuscate the plot itself. We're never quite sure what's real, what's a dream, and what a little girl might be interpreting from reality into her cinematic memory. It turns out (SPOILER ALERT, in case you are interested in watching this mess) that daddy Noah is not, in fact, a werewolf, but is merely an abusive alcoholic. His binges and violent outbursts are translated in the film -- facilitated as it is by Willow's perspective -- as his monstrosity (think The Shining). We see her reading Jack London's White Fang, suggesting her choice of literature is shaping her ability to make sense of her own abuse. Worse, there's an outing Imogen and Willow take about halfway through the film that overtly reveals that, metaphoric monstrosity or not, they are both victims of domestic abuse. 

The subjective haze around this otherwise potentially compelling narrative nugget makes it difficult to understand how a screenplay so half-baked could ever get green-lit, and why nobody involved suggested any additional workshops or revisions. An hour in, it's still trying to articulate the filial dynamics that were established in the first ten minutes; by the denouement, it's just beating us over the head with what was an obvious and simplistic resolution. The production design and characterizations make no sense; their rustic life is meant to be modern somehow, and yet for gifts they wrap things in plain brown paper and Willow is thrilled to receive match sticks, while their house boasts and enormous family portrait and a thronelike chair for its patriarch. These disparate elements actively confuse and distract our awareness as the film develops incrementally between nightmare fake-outs. Apart from a few almost-scary moments -- mostly shot in blink-and-you'll-miss-it bursts of shadowy images -- the film adds nothing to the subgenre, and is in fact very pointedly not a creature feature, merely muddying the waters with wasted opportunities and disappointingly trite messaging.

Do yourself a favor and skip this one. If you're hankering for a recent werewolf movie, spend time with The Wolf of Snow Hollow, The Cursed, or this year's brand new Wolf Man, all of which are better viewing experiences in every way.