The Beast Within is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.
The Beast Within is the least fun werewolf movie I’ve seen.
Alexander J. Farrell, who is normally a documentary filmmaker, brings us this horror-lite werewolf picture starring Kit Harington. Harington, top billed, is more accurately the third lead in a film with only four characters. He doesn’t say a line of dialogue until the 23-minute mark, for one. While his character Noah is the one inflicted with the titular “beast within,” the film is centered around his young daughter Willow (Caoilinn Springall) as she comes to learn about the affliction that plagues her family.
The Beast Within is, ostensibly, a film about a werewolf. But the truer explanation of its premise is that it is a film about lycanthropy as a thin metaphor for domestic abuse. As such, there is little kitschy fun to be had in seeing Harington transform into a beast and wreak havoc underneath the full moon (we barely see any of the werewolf-y stuff, anyway). Instead, we are subject to dreary scenes depicting the emotional toll that having a werewolf family member would take on a person (this sounds silly in its own right, but trust me that the film treats this premise with deadly seriousness).
The language of the film mirrors domestic abuse trauma. Willow’s mother Imogene (Ashleigh Cummings) is constantly on edge, and she appears shaken when talking about Noah. Willow at one point asks, “why does he [her father] always come home like that?” The film wallows in the melodrama of a household in pain, and it wants the horror conventions and iconography (what little there is of it) to help elevate this to a legitimate drama.
However, the two are incompatible. The dour and slow dramatic material nerfs whatever potency the horror might have. And borrowing from the horror genre makes the trauma of the drama feel like a gimmick. It becomes evident that the film really has little to say about the experience of domestic abuse, just that it wishes to depict it as part of a relationship with horror genre tropes. The two genres cannibalize each other, leaving behind a drab and monotonous story that plods through conventional plot points towards no meaningful end.
The acting doesn’t help matters much. Cummings over-does it, Harington undersells it. The best performance comes from character actor James Cosmo as the father-in-law to the monstrous husband. His character, however, is the least consequential, and you can probably guess from moment one what his ultimate fate will be.
To be fair, The Beast Within never sets out to take a light approach to these tropes. Still, the conflation of something disturbingly true to life and something outlandishly fantastical results in a muddy exploration that never goes further than skin deep.
The Beast Within: D
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
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