Of all the horror subgenres, the werewolf movie is perhaps the hardest to pull off.
While there have been some highlights over the years, like the original The Wolf Man, An American Werewolf in London, The Howling and Teen Wolf (for those with major ’80s high school nostalgia), there have probably been many more low points, including Mike Nichols’ Wolf, the Benicio del Toro-starrer The Wolfman and a PG-13 version of Little Red Riding Hood, where Amanda Seyfried plays both the child and lover of werewolves.
The Beast Within
Part of what makes the genre tough to crack is the creature itself, which never manages to scare us quite enough. This is in part due to special effects makeup and VFX that, more often than not, can look pretty ridiculous on screen. And it may also be because so many of us are dog lovers, which means watching a man-dog-thingy running around killing people doesn’t exactly terrify us.
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The team behind The Beast Within were clearly aware of all this when they concocted their new werewolf flick, which stars Kit Harington as a lycanthrope with some serious parenting issues. Applying the old Val Lewton rule that the less we see of the monster, the better, director Alexander J. Farrell keeps his killer canine off screen for nearly the entire movie. And even when we do finally see it, the beast is mostly hidden in smoke and shadow.
It’s a smart move that lends an unsettling tone to this childhood horror story, which is told from the viewpoint of a little girl, Willow (Caoilinn Springall), growing up in a big ol’ haunted castle with a monster lurking close by.
That monster may very well be her father, Noah (Harington), whom we quickly begin to suspect has some major skin, hair and teeth problems each month when there’s a full moon. His wife, Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings), does her best to deal with them, offering him live pigs for supper and keeping Noah far enough away from home so as not to be too much of a danger to the family.
Farrell, who wrote the script with Greer Ellison, gets the most out of the constrained setup, following Willow as she slowly but surely learns the truth about her dad. Saddled with an oxygen tank due to a strange sickness, the girl is both fascinated and terrified by Noah, who can be fun-loving in one moment and totally threatening the next.
The filmmakers keep things purposely ambiguous, whether regarding Noah’s condition or signs that Willow may have inherited her father’s genes. This lends a certain mystery to the proceedings but also means there are few genuine frights, with Farrell resorting to some easy jump scares to try and get our blood boiling (although there’s little actual blood in the movie).
As its title indicates, The Beast Within is more psychological horror than gorefest, probing the emotional struggles of Willow, Imogen and Noah as they come to terms with their family crisis. Harington does a convincing job in that sense, playing a man who can be loving and seething — or is that teething? — at the same time. In one strong scene, he unveils his dark family history to Willow in a way that underlines Noah’s dangerous inner fragility, which is not something you see in every werewolf story.
Such murky details are what make the film intriguing but also a bit of a letdown — because the first rule of a good werewolf flick, or any horror flick for that matter, is to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, whereas Farrell mostly keeps us guessing.
He does have a knack for staging action in restrained locations, with the entire film set around the crumbling family chateau and misty neighboring forest. (The country and time period are unspecified, though it looks like it could be postwar England.) Both cinematographer Daniel Katz and production designer Russell De Rozario deserve kudos for getting lots of visual mileage out of what surely wasn’t a huge budget, using a colorful palette to make the creepy settings feel less claustrophobic.
The polished craft contributions and solid cast — which also includes veteran James Cosmo (Braveheart) as Noah’s edgy father-in-law — help to round out a tight production package. But it’s one built around a concept that doesn’t entirely work in the end, especially in a finale that undercuts everything we’ve just seen as it attempts to give a new and very timely spin on an old genre.
