Posted by THE BEAST WITHIN; 2024; Written by Alexander J. Farrell & Greer Ellison; Directed by Alexander J. Farrell; Starring Kit Harington, Ashleigh Cummings, James Cosmos, Caoilinn Springall; WellGo USA; 1h37m; R.
Let’s get this out of the way. The Beast Within is not a good movie. It’s pretty bad overall, with little to recommend. But it’s a sad sort of bad. The Beast Within, not based on the bladder-effect-laden town-with-a-secret/werewolf movie of 1982 that I like a good deal, is not the Madame Web, Tarot, Strangers Chapter 1 inept bad of a whole creative team not giving all that many fucks to try to make something worthwhile, leading to groan-worthy terrible experiences.
The Beast Within has a purpose. It has a message, a metaphor until it’s directed stated – just in case you, dear viewer, didn’t get it, and a general amount of competence to the filmmaking. The story of a young girl dealing with finding out her father is a werewolf is a nice start. Writer-Director Alexander J. Farrell (writing with Greer Ellison) has something to say with it but muddles it with a supremely dull and dry film that had me aching such a way that when I looked at my watch, convinced I had to be halfway in by now, found only twenty minutes had passed.
There is something interesting and talking-point worthy at the heart. Ten-year-old Willow (Caoilinn Springall, Stopmotion) lives in a crumbling manse deep in the English countryside with her family; parents Noah (Kit Harington, Game of Thrones) and Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings, NOS4A2), along with maternal grandfather Waylon (James Cosmo, also Game of Thrones). There’s an attempt at telling the story through Willow from a child’s perspective with her distant relations: she hears arguments through doors, her parents don’t tell her anything directly, and furtive comings and goings are spied through windows. This can replicate the lost feeling of being a child in a situation one cannot understand. But this is done via long stretches of strange and stilted dialogue, if any at all, to create this aspect. It’s meant to create atmosphere and feeling but it comes off annoying and forced. This, above all, belabors the film. It doesn’t feel natural and it’s frustrating, moving at a snail’s pace.
Within the story, there is room to explore finding out uncomfortable truths about yourself and your family. Witnessing an event like Willow does shift perspectives, as one grows from a young child to a young adult. The Beast Within uses that shift to look at what makes a monster, abuse, and generational trauma. Sadly, it does so incredibly poorly with the mentioned cringe dialogue (all the actors do fine enough forcing through it) and just being muddled overall, until the film becomes very direct with a “did you get it? I need to know you got it!” final minute. I’m all for slow burns, but even I was just screaming for anything to move the plot forward. Especially with the gratuitous amount of dream-scare sequences that seem like we’re moving forward but no.
To vaguely get to the end (no spoilers), when it does come to a head and things happen, Farrell and cinematographer Daniel Katz elect to shoot it in just about pitch black so one can go “Yes, something is happening… no, I can’t tell what it is.” Shame, as the look-up until then is a strong point; picturesque folk-horror feeling fog-cloaked moors, expanses of open countryside.
The Beast Within is a painfully slow drag of a film, wasting an interesting take on the werewolf subgenre. If you want a far better recent werewolf movie that slipped by most people, might I suggest 2022’s The Cursed? Watch that instead.
D+
