THE BEAST WITHIN (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Beast Within, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 25, 2024

Just about, if not, everything in The Beast Within is seen from the perspective of Willow (Caoilinn Springall), an 11-year-old girl living with her parents on a farm in the middle of the forest. Her mother is always there for her, except one guaranteed occasion. That's when a full moon rises.

When that happens, Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings), the mother, ventures out into the forest in the family truck. With her, she brings a caged pig and her husband, Willow's father, cloaked in a heavy fur coat. When Imogen returns in the morning, it's only with the husband, who needs help getting out of the truck and into bed for a long rest. The pig is nowhere to be seen.

What is Willow to make of this recurring event? That's a question that seems to be answered immediately in co-writer/director Alexander J. Farrell's movie, with a prologue showing a woman being hunted and attacked by some beast in the woods during a full moon, and is later given a firmer answer, when the girl witnesses her mother and father during one of their regular expeditions. If the explanation that the father is a werewolf doesn't sit quite right while watching this story unfold, there might be a good reason for that skepticism.

The question of what Willow is to make of her father remains, in other words, because here's a straightforward horror tale with slightly more to say than the usual stuff of lycanthropes. The father's existence as a werewolf becomes a metaphor for more grounded acts, behavior, and psychology here, and if it starts to feel a bit disingenuous and distasteful to use the supernatural as an allegory for domestic abuse, that's primarily because the material is so shallow that such an idea is really the only one of note that it possesses.

Willow's father, by the way, is named Noah, and he's played by Kit Harington in an admirably unsettling performance. The man is a mystery for the first act or so of Farrell and Greer Taylor Ellison's screenplay, when we only see him from behind or covered by that coat. That's the most significant impression the daughter has of her father at the moment, apparently, since the movie lives with her point of view. She watches from the window as the ritual with the pig and the long drive unfolds, and in her sleep, she dreams of Noah lying in bed—a restless sleep in which his body bends and breaks as some transformation overcomes him.

Does she somehow already know, or are the filmmakers suggesting something else with that nightmare? To be fair to the screenwriters, there is a tight sort of logic to the narrative, which only shows us so much of what happens to father and what he becomes until a certain point in the story. Willow has to infer or imagine the reason behind the almost-monthly routine her parents perform, and Farrell is cunning with what the camera sees and what the movie cuts around while she witnesses certain events.

The technical slyness works against the movie's intentions, though, because we're left with something that feels like a cheap allegory. When the screenplay finally reveals its hand after a lengthy climax that indulges in a supernatural standoff on the farm and through the forest, it feels even cheaper and more than a bit dishonest.

Before any of that, though, we watch as Willow, her mother, her father, and her maternal grandfather Waylon (James Cosmo) live in a perpetual stalemate of secrecy. The girl overhears conversations between the adults, noting words like "monster" and arguments between different parties about what's supposed to be done under such circumstances.

Waylon is protective of his granddaughter, ensuring that she's always in the house, protected by an imposing gate, whenever a full moon comes. Imogen is tender with her daughter, and in one scene, the pair travel to the local town, with the mother teaching her daughter how to drive on the way and buying the girl a nice dress when they arrive. While Imogen changes into a dress of her own on the way into town, Willow sneaks a view of her mother through the rearview mirror, noticing that her torso is covered in bruises.

Eventually, Noah becomes clearer in girl's view and, hence, the movie's, as well. Harington's performance is disturbing because we can see him as a loving, attentive father and husband on some occasions, only for that attitude to suddenly drop. Once we know what's going on here, the actor's work comes to feel like the most genuine element of the movie, simply because he's playing this role as it is, without any of the distractions surrounding it.

There are plenty of distractions here, too, although it's not until the very final moments of The Beast Within that we truly understand how many exist and how extensive they actually are. It's meant to surprise, of course, but the revelation only does in terms of making us wonder why the filmmakers treat something like that with such genre-based flippancy.

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