July 22, 2024
United Kingdom | English
2024 | 96 Minutes
Director: Alexander J. Farrell
Cast: James Cosmo, Ashleigh Cummings, Kit Harington, Caoilinn Springall
The werewolf genre has been done to death, so when news on The Beast Within first reached me, I was both fascinated and enthralled to read that a fresh take – and one that seemed quite interesting, was coming to a screen near me.
Directed by esteemed documentary filmmaker Alexander J. Farrell, making his narrative storytelling debut, who has spent his career making documentary films that focus on injustice, like ‘Refugee’, which records the perilous journey travelled by Syrian refugees as they cross over two thousand miles miles and ten countries, following the story of one particular family, desperate to be united after being separated by war.
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Farrell, in his debut fiction film, brings much of that ideology to The Beast Within – with mixed results.
Kit Harington (Game Of Thrones) is a father with a secret that he is desperately trying to keep under control. His mysterious excursions at night leave his ailing daughter Willow (Caoilinn Springall, The Midnight Sky) plagued with questions. The old, timeless house in the woods that she lives in with her caring mother (Ashleigh Cummings, NOS4A2) and absent father feels more like a haunted castle than a loving home. As she investigates her father’s bizarre and dark behavior, a monstrous figure emerges from the shadows, terrorizing those who encounter it. Supported by her grandfather (James Cosmo, Braveheart), she attempts to unravel the mysteries of the creature. Creature.
The uncanniness of childhood in all its revelry and magnificence is front and center in The Beast Within, which plunges its audience into a world haunted by a creature that stalks at the full moon. Or does it?
There are two massive plot holes during the film that just can’t be ignored. In order to point these out, I must first issue a spoiler warning. Ok. Read on at your own peril.
First, there’s a scene where Willow watches everyone load up the family Land Rover, pig and all, through a window that is quite obviously several floors above the scene and leave down a long road. Yet, when they arrive, there she is. So, um, how did she get down three flights of stairs, while using an oxygen tank, and sneak into the back of the vehicle where the caged pig was. Or did she walk it, dragging her oxygen tank behind her while traveling at the same speed as the Rover!?
The second is towards the end, where Willow uses the Land Rover to rip off a grate that leads to a crawl space below the floorboards of the house to aid in the escape of her mother and grandfather who are running from a “werewolf”. How did she know they were under the floor boards?
Then, there’s a major plot twist at the end of the film that completely and utterly unravels everything, and I mean everything, that the film had been slowly building towards during its entire run. Just like that; washed away, and suddenly nothing at all makes sense. Whole scenes were now truly pointless and worse, no longer made any sense whatsoever. Sloppy, sloppy storytelling. Instead, the viewer is left wonder why they were subjected to stories of ancestors, fairy tales and fables, when this twist that I’m going to avoid giving away, makes every part of it redundant.
The film, while beautifully shot and well acted, ends up being a bit of a bore. What I thought was a long slow burn delivery that was leading to something big and juicy ends up leading to a moronic plot twist that quite literally made me groan in my seat, and the more I thought about it, the more I hated it and the more I realized this twist stripped away all the interesting parts of the film.
I get what The Beast Within was trying to accomplish – honestly, I do. It walks the path laid by great films like Pans Labyrinth, where our main character uses fairy tales to hide her brutality and the truth of her young existence and that is an interesting idea. It really falls short here, as The Beast Within never really properly wraps up its loose ends and instead feels like two unrelated stories that are smooshed together at the end and the resulting mess is left as an open to interpterion sort of chaotic disaster.
Unfortunate, because as I mentioned; I really felt like the eons old lycanthrope fable was about to breathe fresh air again. Instead, it chokes on its own vomit.
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I was wondering why a werewolf film had no body count or blood nor gore, and now I know why. What I at first thought was going to be an interesting and fresh take on one of the eldest fables in horror soon became too stupid for words. (Yet here we are; me writing about it and you reading my words.)
So what’s left? Well, it’s pretty. And Kit Harington’s channeling of Tom Hardy was pretty good. To be honest, the acting from the whole cast was splendid. That’s about all though. Quite literally everyone involved in the film acted their parts brilliantly – but like my former boss used to tell me; you can’t build a solid house on a crooked foundation.
