“The Beast Within” is Calling! Own Your Copy Here!
Infirmed 10-year-old girl Willow witnesses one night a month her mother whisking away her rather distant father into the dense woods deep within the English countryside. When brought home the next day, her father must be helped carried in, appearing haggard and weak from his strange and mysteriously kept overnight departure far from home. The secret festers between the parents, as well with her grandfather, to a point where tensions rise to the surface and the family is slowly falling and drifting apart. One night, Willow decides to sneak onto one of those one-a-month egresses and discovers her father, left chained inside a dilapidated structure in the middle of the wooded nowhere, transforms into a horrible beast. From that point on, the family secret was no more, and she must come to terms with her parents’ deception and their struggling family cohesion before the next full moon rises above their isolated home compound.
Lycanthrope films are on the rise with the anticipation of two new theatrical releases that have seen positive reactions just by their trailers alone with “The Invisible Man’s” Leigh Whannell staying in the Dark Universe with “Wolf Man,” slated for the silver screen January of 2025, and “Scream of the Banshee’s” Steven C. Miller going wild and hair near this Christmas season with his chaotic and carnage-ladened “Werewolves.” Kicking it off in the werewolf category however is English director Alexander J. Farrell making his debut fictional feature with “The Beast Within.” The 2024 released conceited thriller plays on a child’s perception of events, especially when she sees her parents joyless faces, co-written by Farrell and more seasoned screenwriter Grear Ellison (“A Woman At Night”) and both have worked previously on Farrell’s last two projects, a documentary entitled “Making a Killing” that sheds like an antiquated law that results in capping financial need after preventable medical negligence and another cowritten session, a RomCom in “How to Date Billy Walsh” that was also released in 2024. The UK production comes from a conglomerate of companies in Paradox House, Future Artist Entertainment, and private equity group Filmology Finance and is produced by the father-son duo Gary and Ryan Hamilton of Archlight Films who oversaw global sales of the film, Martin Owen, Tammy Batshon, Spencer Friend, Evan Ross, Sebastian Street, and Paolo Pilladi.
Looking for his next big hit to branch out from the shadow of “Game of Thrones’” bastard hero, Jon Snow, is Kit Harrington taking the headlining role as an intermittent explosive disorder father struggling to keep his family whole because of his own family curse. Often resembling the HBO role that made him a household name when donning that iconic large fur coat that became an innate symbol of the Stark family, Harrington’s Noah character fails to become uniquely recognized as he’s quite the mystery with little background to his compound abode and his occupation of what seems to be a lumberjack of sorts, always cutting down trees in the nearby forest. What’s even more mysterious is the family lineage of temporarily transmogrifying into an aggressive, animalistic beast when the full moon is high. His reason for being cursed stems mostly from anecdotal knowledge of his own grandfather’s tragic history with being plagued by the same condition. This places Noah’s family onto spider-cracking eggshells as his wife Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings, “NOS4A2”) finds herself loyal to a fault by caring for Noah’s condition but taking the brunt of his abusive behavior all the while daughter Willow (“Caoilinn Springall, “Stopmotion”) initially doesn’t know what’s truly happening but has this underlining fear of her father, noted by wedging her rocking horse underneath her room’s door handle every night. Willow’s grandfather and Imogen’s dad Waylon (James Cosmo, “Highlander”) serves as a buffer between Noah and his family, maybe even perhaps the voice of reason. Performances are mostly strong with Harrington forcing Noah’s hand a little to be brutish, a quality that doesn’t quite stick as intended. There’s also some finale unresolve essentials with Waylon that doesn’t determine his fate as we’re left with only a threadbare implied outcome, an unfortunate state for one of the handful of principal characters. The supporting actors rounds out with Ian Giles and Martina McClements (“When the Lights Went Out”) who never share scenes with the key intimate cast.
Aforementioned, “The Beast Within” is from the perspective of a child, in this case a child with great imaginative qualities as seen with her hobby of matchitecture of her home and nearby buildings, but the story is also definitively an allegory for an abusive husband and father that uses the lycanthrope mythology as a bestial symbol for one man’s vile nature. Noah’s deceptive behavior lures in what the family wants, a loving husband and adoring father providing, protecting, and caring for them, but Farrell strings along a hidden truth with spot visual clues of Noah’s true self. Those clues are terribly evident to the family devolution but there’s also a stasis of hope when Noah’s charm and smile glimmer through the cracks of his monstrous shell that’s mostly kept at bay from the audience. The allegory keeps well until the end and then the allegory loses its legs and not mounting to much when everything laid before our eyes in the story is suddenly washed away by Farrell’s inability to stick with his metaphorical story and go explicit in the last few scenes when the child’s perspective veil is dropped, as if the new feature director couldn’t trust audiences to come to their own conclusions. Yet, timeless set locations in the expansive English countryside, the compound set design, performances, and the limited but practical effects of the wolf man add to the independent film’s slow burn horror-dramaturgy that seizes the opportunity to label man a beast under his worst genetical conditions.
A terrible, dark, ancestral secret can never be contained and now the terrible animal is loose onto Blu-ray home video from Well Go USA Entertainment. The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD25 stacks up against the rest of the label’s catalogue as par for the course with a slightly softer image mostly under natural daylight and key night lighting and foundationally based with a mixture of yellow and red hues. Though soft, details are not lost. There’s an abundance of sharper medium to closeup shots, especially in darker scenes, where granular textures surface and the layers separate more distinctly. Where the softness prevails is in the exterior wide shots of the 1.78:1 aspect ratio that can’t seem to not only create a greater sense of space but also can’t fathom the finer diversities of road, land, forest, and structure in what is likely a dovetail diffusion of color around the edges. Ultimately, your brain figures it out but to the eyes the landscape is a bit one noted. There is a pinch of splodgy murkiness in the shadows that doesn’t affect the presentation immensely. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 diffuses the layers with solid balance. There’s plenty of isolated audio capillaries to carry over the ambiance denotations of an ever-present fear, such as the howling wind, the violent banging of a fortified gate, or even the animalistic sounds deep in the distance, creating the depth needed to present danger from afar. This is also coupled with tighter tension of closer vibrations, the hacking of the trees, the creaking of a floors, etc., for heightened lossless reproduction. Dialogue renders clearly and cleanly throughout. English and French subtitles are available for preference. In the special features department, this Well Go USA release only comes with the film’s trailer plus pre-feature previews of other label releases. The Blu-ray disc is pressed with a clawed imagery inside a standard Blu-ray Amaray with snap-lock and has only an advert card in the insert for this film, sharing space with “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” and “You Gotta Believe.” Rated R for Strong Violent Content and Language, “The Beast Within” has a runtime of 97 minutes and is listed as region A playback only but I was able to play the disc in Region B.
Last Rites: “The Beast Within” is a by-the-book and subdued English allegory for fearsome behavior and Farrell’s debut is finely drawn but up to a point when audiences are quickly subjected to an unnecessary and redundant end-all, tell-all of daddy’s true being.
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