The beauty makes a stronger impression than the creature whose title, “The Beast Within,” is the film’s first feature from documentarian Alexander J. Farrell. It’s a beautiful, modestly-sized work of art that benefits largely from being shot around the historic Harewood Forest and Castle in West Yorkshire. The 14th-century structures give this supernatural tale a certain timelessness, while cinematographer Daniel Katz’s beautiful aerial shots of the surrounding landscape lend it another. But the story of a young family trapped in eerie isolation by a familiar horror-movie curse is so sparsely populated and under-plotted that it’s a good exercise in the genre without the freshness or depth to make it anything memorable.
After a brief prologue that hints at a centuries-old genetic disease, the unspecified present (possibly any time in the past fifty years) finds our main characters living lives not unlike their ancestors, working as farmers and herding cattle. Ten-year-old Willow (Caolin Springall, who played the ghost girl opposite George Clooney in The Midnight Sky ) is a sickly, asthmatic child with no siblings or playmates. She lives in an aristocratic but sparse country estate, protected by her mother Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings) and maternal grandfather Waylon (James Cosmo).
They're all a little nervous when it comes to the fourth member of the family, Noah (Game of Thrones star Kit Harington). When he's around, he's a stern, controlling husband and father, and his authority is somewhat resented by the equally overbearing grandfather. But he's often absent—and, as Willow spies one day, he sometimes comes home naked, dirty, and covered in blood, looking like he's gone rogue. Which he has.
It doesn't take long for her terrified daughter to realize that her father, the self-proclaimed “King of the Jungle,” is going crazy with every full moon. For now, his bloodlust can be slaked by the hapless farm animals that Imogen leaves to devour after she has him chained up in a nearby ruin. But as her grandfather observes, “He's getting worse.” His relatives are inevitably threatened by the next explosion of werewolf chaos.
“The Beast Within”—not to be confused with Philippe Mora’s 1982 film of the same name, a delightfully cheesy horror—is thoughtfully considered in its design departments. These range from the baroque details (such as the chandeliers made of elk antlers) in Russell De Rosario’s production design to the occasional traditional folk tune in Nathan Klein and Jack Halama’s effective original score. Katz’s wide-screen cinematography offers some gorgeous “enchanted forest” images of dark, fog-shrouded woods, straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.
But while the pacing and performances are skillful enough, director and Greer Taylor Ellison’s script lack enough substance to generate much suspense or empathy. The family dynamics feel contrived, with Willow early on suspicious (and plagued by nightmares) about her father’s nature. Harington’s surprisingly nude performance might be better suited to a simpler werewolf genre—one in which Lon Chaney Jr. or Oliver Reed aren’t required to be more than two-dimensional, just plain creepy.
But “Monster” wants to be taken seriously as a domestic psychological drama, albeit without building enough complexity and nuance to function. There are hints that what’s really going on here is an indictment of patriarchal toxic masculinity. But that angle is underdeveloped, and so late that it seems like little more than a fashionable afterthought. Likewise, there’s some vague significance to Willow’s play with the dollhouse and action figures (suggesting that she may be manipulating larger events) that never comes into focus.
Farrell clearly wants to create “elevated” horror, and he succeeds to some extent in terms of good acting and visual precision. But the actual ideas that might elevate this genre film above the usual genre fare fall short, while the vivid tension and unsettling character recognition needed to transcend a more modest level never quite arrive. In the ample annals of werewolf cinema to date, The Beast Within is a good-looking sidenote, a polished diversion that ultimately satisfies just enough in neither refined nor conventional terms to stick.
Well Go US plans to release “The Beast Within” in the US on July 26.
