The Big Picture

The Beast Within
fails to balance its human story with its monster movie trappings.
As a werewolf film, it falls short due to its ineffective practical effects and a muddled commentary on domestic abuse.
Ashleigh Cummings delivers a solid performance, but the film struggles to find its footing between genre expectations and serious themes.

Of all the classic movie monsters, I’d argue the werewolf is the toughest to separate from its modest horror origins. You can make an opulent and prestigious vampire picture, no problem. And Frankenstein’s Monster is great to use for a thoughtful character study on the dangers of perverting science to feed your own ambitions. Mummies fit right into fun, historical adventures! Werewolves, however, aren’t exactly fertile ground for expansion. You can use them to talk about how we humans aren’t as removed from the animal kingdom as we’d like to think we are, but otherwise, they are typically best left to serve their original purpose. That’s why the best werewolf movies — from An American Werewolf in London to The Howling — typically revel in their B-movie glory. You go see a werewolf movie, you want to see gnarly transformations and a few throats get ripped out.

The Beast Within, a new werewolf movie starring Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington and from director Alexander J. Farrell (a photographer and documentarian making his narrative feature debut), is the latest salvo in proving my theory untrue. Because while there is a werewolf in The Beast Within, it’s not a film about a werewolf. Instead, this is a film about an abusive marriage, as told through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl who’s finally old enough to start noticing the bruises on her mother’s body and the lengths the matriarch will go to keep her family together, even when all signs point to keeping father around being a terrible idea. To be blunt: The movie doesn’t work. All credit to Farrell and his co-writer Greer Ellison for having an angle they wanted to explore here and sticking with it. But I can’t imagine The Beast Within satisfying many werewolf-movie fans, and its genre trappings and more serious thematic concerns are blended so haphazardly that any grand points it’s trying to make about domestic abuse are lost in the shuffle. To make matters worse, the film uses its final scene to so explicitly spell out its already not-so-subtle subtext that it renders the whole enterprise somewhat ludicrous.

The Beast Within (2024) The Beast Within follows 10-year-old Willow, who begins to question her family’s isolated life on a fortified compound in the English wilds. After following her parents on a secret trek into the forest, she discovers her father’s horrifying transformation, uncovering a dark family secret.Director Alexander Farrell Writers Alexander Farrell

What Is ‘The Beast Within’ About?

The young girl’s name is Willow, and she’s capably played by actress Caoilinn Springall (Stopmotion). Willow already has a bit of a rough life thanks to an unnamed respiratory disease (asthma, I’m guessing?) that forces her to always have an oxygen tank and mask nearby in case her breathing becomes a struggle. Willow lives in an old, large-ish manor house on a farm bordering the woods out in the middle of nowhere. The exact time period is a little nebulous, although at one point she’s listening to music on headphones that couldn’t be more than four decades old. Regardless, her lifestyle feels very old-fashioned and extremely cutoff from any larger community. She heads into a nearby town with her mother, Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings) to buy clothes at one point, but we never see her go to school or play with any friends. Willow mostly sticks to her room, building a replica of her farm out of matchsticks.

The Beast Within lets us know right up front that something is not right with Dad, a man named Noah (Harington), who at the start of the movie appears sickly and is being hurriedly shuttled away from the manor by his wife and her elderly father (who’s played by Harington’s old Night’s Watch commander, James Cosmo). It turns out, there are times when Noah very much becomes a danger to his family, and Mom has no choice but to drive him to the ruins of a nearby castle-like structure, lock him in chains, and seal him behind a wrought-iron gate. “Nothing changes,” he implores to her as she chains him up. “Nothing changes,” she dutifully replies. The family unit has to stay together no matter what, even though the overly aggressive Noah doesn’t seem like the greatest of fathers (or husbands) even on his good days.

Willow’s granddad doesn’t like the direction things are headed though, and, eventually, neither does Willow. Tensions in the family continue to grow, triggering the harsh symptoms of Willow’s illness more and more often. When Noah finds a secret dress that Imogen changes into when she drives into town, he becomes enraged. Granddad is eventually forced to leave the house, and ultimately the family reaches a critical breaking point during a stormy evening when Noah is supposed to be locked away deep in the woods but instead returns home looking to impose his brutal will on the family.

‘The Beast Within’ Is More Concerned with the Darkness of Man Than It Is Beast

If you come to The Beast Within looking for a sturdy and straightforward werewolf movie, you’re going to leave disappointed because the movie really isn’t interested in serving that need. Yes, we do eventually see Harington in his wolf form. But the practical effects feel cheap and “costume-y,” and any glimpses we get of him transforming are so short and out of context (one occurs during a dream sequence) that they barely even register. So set those expectations aside at the theater door. More problematically, and for a number of reasons, the film doesn’t work as a strong commentary on domestic abuse. The werewolf trappings make the overall message muddled.

At times, the film also treats lycanthropy as an illness to be overcome and/or a family curse, rather than simply the uncontrolled rages of a single man. It even opens with a short prologue flashing back to Noah’s similarly-afflicted grandfather, who he later admits to having never met, which I guess implies that tendencies to commit domestic abuse can be passed down through the generations genetically? I’m not going to argue science I know nothing about, but I will say this is not a viewpoint the movie bothers to ruminate much on.

Truthfully, it’s really hard to get a feeling for any time the core family here did make sense to anyone, as Harington feels threateningly off-kilter even during extremely short flashbacks to better times. It’s an odd character made odder by the performance, and Farrell’s framing of this man who’s clearly destroying the lives of those around him never feels more than half-formed. He’s a monster all right, but exactly what kind of monster feels loosely examined here through a vague genre exercise … until it’s suddenly made more explicit in ham-fisted ways.

Harington Is Not the Best Performer in ‘The Beast Within’
Photo via WellGO Entertainment

Harington’s name on the poster undoubtedly got The Beast Within funded, but, if there is a performance here worth discussing, it’s the one given by Cummings, who does good work inhabiting a woman who is scared and living under a terrible burden, but is also maybe too traumatized to ever fully commit to escaping to a new life. Springall, who bears a remarkable resemblance to a young Anna Chlumsky, also acquits herself nicely, considering she’s a young actress asked to carry much of this film’s emotional load.

Behind the camera, Farrell does show a keen photographer’s eye. Both the farm and the surrounding woods are filmed in sumptuous detail, and the film has a number of striking visuals, including an early shot that slowly moves vertically through the house, traveling four stories and introducing the audience to all the core characters. However, his hand is far less assured when it comes to the story, as a film like this needs to properly balance its genre foundations (and the expectations that come with that) with the more serious and somber themes it decides to tackle. In that regard, The Beast Within, a human tragedy awkwardly disguised in wolf’s clothing, stumbles badly.

REVIEW The Beast Within (2024) The Beast Within is a dull-toothed werewolf movie with a darkly human heart.ProsAshleigh Cummings gives a nice performance, and the movie does look good. ConsYes, the best horror films are about more than just the monster, but ‘The Beast Within’ fails to properly balance its human story with its monster-movie trappings.Fans looking for a strong werewolf movie won’t find it here; folks looking for a compelling family drama about a mother and child living a domestic nightmare won’t find that either.

The Beast Within had its World Premiere at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival and opens July 26 in movie theaters in the U.S. Click below for showtimes near you.

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