Director Alexander J. Farrell’s The Beast Within opens with a quote about there “being two wolves inside each of us,” followed by a brief but bloody werewolf attack. In other words, he’s not being coy about what this particular movie is about, and it’s no spoiler to say that our protagonist, Noah (Kit Harington), is dealing with an acute case of lycanthropy. Which is why it’s all the more disappointing when the film inexplicably downplays any genre thrills for yet another slow-paced, somber mood piece about lost innocence or whatever. In other words, we are firmly in elevated horror territory, immersed in what writer Parul Sehgal refers to as ”‘the trauma plot.” Preexisting psychic damage is everywhere, and it defines everything.
Much of the film unfolds from the perspective of young Willow (Caoilinn Springall), who lives in a secluded compound with mother Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings), father Noah, and grandfather Waylon (James Cosmo). Imogen is a caring, attentive parent, but occasionally she and Noah disappear, and when they return Imogen must clean blood off of his clothes. Harington plays Noah as a coiled bundle of anger, turning his pretty boy good looks into something that feels much more dangerous. Farrell and co-writer Greer Taylor Ellison do manage to string some genuine tension out of their scenario, as Willow must gradually discover what we in the audience already know. There’s deep familial discord here, which we only get snippets of: Noah seems moody and erratic even when it’s not a full moon, and Cummings’ portrayal of Imogen suggests deeper traumas than just a monthly transformation. Willow also suffers from some ailment that requires her to drag around an oxygen tank at all times, adding additional stresses onto a family that already feels like it’s falling apart at the seams. The filmmakers try to mix things up, inserting a brief, recurring flashback that proves to be an unreliable memory of sorts, while also occasionally jumbling chronology for brief bursts of expressionistic introspection. But the crux of the film remains fairly banal — something is wrong with Dad, and everybody knows what it is except Willow.
Beyond that, there’s simply not much else to The Beast Within. Cinematographer Daniel Katz crafts some appealing images, in that slick, prestige TV kind of way, but otherwise, Farrell’s film looks like every other ponderous horror movie of recent vintage. There are no surprises to be found, nothing screenwriters haven’t endlessly excavated and viewers endlessly seen before. Mounting dread and tension work best when they build to something explosive, but The Beast Within offers genre fans a scant few minutes of terror only at its very denouement. A ludicrous little twist that ends the film suggests the filmmakers themselves felt a similar way, and decided to goose viewers at the last minute, but it’s too bad the stinger makes no real narrative or conceptual sense. The cast is at least uniformly good, and their commitment carries things as far as something like this can reasonably go. Curiously, if you excised the film’s brief prologue and the film’s final few minutes, you’d have a straightforward, reasonably powerful family melodrama. Which reminds us what a problem it is that this is supposed to be a horror movie. As Scout Tafoya wrote in his original 2019 piece about the rise of this pernicious subgenre, the problem is that you “squint and these films can become about anything.”
DIRECTOR: Alexander J. Farrell; CAST: Kit Harrington, Ashleigh Cummings, James Cosmo, Caoilinn Springall; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: July 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
Originally published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 1.
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