There have been a lot of horror films that use familiar genre tropes and premises to tell emotionally powerful stories that also serve as metaphors or commentaries on deep and complex issues. Alien uses its scary monster to explore underlying themes about rape, sexual assault, and forced impregnation. Godzilla (1954) is both a groundbreaking monster movie and a metaphor for the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
Pan’s Labyrinth is an explicitly anti-fascist film that utilizes its many scary-looking creatures, especially the Pale Man, to critique Francisco Franco’s reign over Spain after the Spanish Civil War. These types of horror films are nothing new, and if done right, they can go on to become some of the best and most memorable movies within the genre.
I am bring this up because it’s incredibly obvious that The Beast Within wants to be lumped into this category of artistically driven, thematically rich horror movies. The movie has two goals it attempts to achieve: to be a simple yet intense werewolf horror story starring two Game of Thrones stars (Kit Harington and James Cosmo, respectively) and a metaphor/commentary on domestic abuse and the gaslights/threats that are exchanged within a toxic and violent family relationship. However, “attempt” is the key word here because, as admirable as these goals are, the film ultimately does a terrible job at accomplishing them.
With no exaggeration, The Beast Within is one of the most agonizingly slow, technically incompetent, and laughably pathetic films I saw at this year’s Fantasia Festival. For a movie that is trying to be this severe and terrifying werewolf horror story that explores these dark themes of domestic abuse and violence, I was more cringing or laughing at what I was watching than anything else. It fails to be an allegory for domestic abuse because the way it communicates these ideas is not only incredibly on-the-nose, but it also lacks any of the nuance or substance that would make such an allegory even remotely interesting. The film makes the most barebones, surface-level observations possible, and the result is a movie that genuinely has nothing more profound to say aside from “domestic abuse/violence is bad.” It lacks the creative imagery of something like Alex Garland’s Men nor any sharp writing and directing from Big Little Lies. Everything that The Beast Within thinks is accomplishing or saying about this subject matter has been done better in other projects.
However, on top of failing as a metaphor for domestic violence, it also completely drops the ball as a horror film as well. For a movie that’s only one hour and 37 minutes long, The Beast Within felt like it had a four hour runtime because it is excruciatingly slow and needlessly meandering. Throughout the first hour, the film attempts to create and build up a sense of fear that the child’s main character (Caoilinn Springall) supposedly develops as she learns more about her father’s (Harington) werewolf curse. However, because there is neither a sense of urgency nor a reason as to why the audience should care about anything that’s happening, the movie feels less like a gradual development of dread and more like it’s diddling around until it inevitably leads to a predictable final horror confrontation between Werewolf Kit Harrington and his family. There is no semblance of intensity or atmosphere in this film. It actively felt like I was wasting hours of my time for every minute that passed.
Worst of all, though, the movie couldn’t even deliver on fun or scary scenes with the werewolf. Even though the last act mercifully ends the mind-numbingly tedious build up and starts making the characters do something, it isn’t worth suffering through because all the violence is either done off-screen or ruined by quick-cut editing. On a technical level, there is nothing to admire about this movie besides some passable, mediocre performances from its cast. This poorly shot, lit, and paced film leaves very little fun or engagement for the audience to enjoy. Almost every single aspect of The Beast Within is so incompetent and infuriating that the only parts that I could genuinely enjoy are ironically funny parts, like when Kit Harrington knocks his daughter’s sandwich out of her hands and yells, “Shut the fuck up” to her.
Ultimately, The Beast Within is a movie that fails to accomplish anything it sets out to achieve. While its goals are admirable, the result is a movie that is not only bad but forgettable.
Rating: 2/10