Horror narratives and their accompanying tropes have always been used by filmmakers as a method of exploring issues tying in to real-life emotional traumas, of course, but this approach has become so prevalent in recent years that as you watch films like The Invisible Man, Men and the entire Ari Aster oeuvre unfold before your eyes, you can practically hear the filmmakers whispering in your ear about what the on-screen terrors are really supposed to represent. The latest genre effort to work along these lines is Alexander J. Farrell’s The Beast Within, a British import that attempts to use one of the classic monster movie icons, the werewolf, as a way of exploring more commonplace horrors but spends so much time underlining those salient points for viewers that it never quite gets around to be particularly scary or tense or even interesting in the process.
The film is told through the eyes of Willow (Caoilinn Springall), a 10-year-old girl who lives in an isolated farmhouse in an extremely rural part of England along with her parents, Noah (Kit Harrington) and Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings), and Imogen’s father, Waylon (James Cosmo). Although they are virtually cut off from the world, save for the occasional journey into a nearby town for supplies, everyone seems to act as if everything about the situation is perfectly normal. However, like many 10-year-old kids, Willow is smart and intuitive enough to pick up the sense that something isn’t quite right about the situation. There are hushed conversations behind closed doors that quickly cease when she makes her presence known. There is a quietly palpable sense of tension between her parents and her beloved grandfather lurking in even the most benign of situations. And yes, there is that weird thing where once every month or so, Imogen drives Noah off somewhere for a couple of days, accompanied by a pig.
Willow decides to get to the bottom of things once and for all and the next time her parents go off on one of their strange journeys, she secretly follows along, tracking them to a nearby abandoned abbey. It is there that she discovers their dark secret—Noah is, in fact, a genuine werewolf and they elect to bring him out there at the start of every full moon, locking him in with the pig to snack on, so that he won’t hurt Willow. The realization that Willow now knows what is going on throws a wrench into the long-existing family dynamic, with. Waylon determined to get his granddaughter out of an increasingly dangerous situation, Noah going to great lengths to try to win her over to his side and Imogen caught in the middle between her husband and her father while doing whatever she can to try to protect her daughter.
As horror setups go, the one provided here by Farrell and co-writer Greer Ellison is not too bad, I suppose, and could theoretically go in one of two potentially profitable ways. In one, Noah could be a loving father who has actually been turned into a werewolf and it could focus on Willow’s reaction to her beloved dad being transformed into something inexplicable and horrifying. In the other, Noah could just be the kind of monster that is all too real and common and the werewolf angle could merely be Willow’s way of processing her confusion at the notion that the person who is supposed to love and protect her from the dangers of the world could in fact be her greatest threat. Either way, you have a story that, if done properly, could work both as a straightforward horror film and as a painful and poignant metaphor for real-life anxieties and horrors that could potentially strike a chord with many viewers.
The problem with The Beast Within is that it essentially tries to do both of the approaches suggested above—Noah is, in fact, a genuine werewolf who transforms into a bloodthirsty beast at every full moon and is also a violently controlling man who has thoroughly dominated his browbeaten wife through physical and emotional abuse to such an extent that not only does she continue to stay with him, she sides with him and rejects her own father when he makes an attempt to get Willow out of an increasingly unstable situation. Watching a good man being transformed into a beast against his will in front of the child who loves him can be both terrifying and moving but watching a monster transform into another kind of monster is a take that ends up yielding diminishing returns that are further undone by a slow-burn approach that is too poky at times for its own good (despite making its revelations about Noah’s true nature relatively early in the proceedings) and plot elements (such as Willow’s breathing issues that require the occasional use of an oxygen tank) that seem to exist only as set-ups for clumsy payoffs later on.
The Beast Within has been produced with a certain sense of moody style throughout—if Farrell has ultimately not made a good horror film, he has at least made a good-looking one. It also has a strong and sure performance by Springall, who is all too heartbreakingly convincing as the young girl placed into a situation beyond her control by others and forced to grapple with the ramifications of that decision despite still being a child. As a whole, though, the film is so hellbent on letting viewers know what all the werewolf stuff is meant to represent practically from the get-go that it refuses to give them the chance to make those discoveries for themselves. Unless you are the kind of person who likes to watch movies for the very first time with the Blu-ray commentary track of, The Beast Within is an ultimately frustrating work whose undeniable ambitions are undone by its determination to make sure that viewers pick up on each and every one of them.