Beauty makes more of an impression than the titular creature in “The Beast Within.” Documentarian Alexander J. Farrell’s first narrative feature is a handsomely crafted, modestly scaled affair that benefits from being shot largely around the historic Harewood Woods and Castle in West Yorkshire. Structures dating back to the 14th century lend this supernatural tale one kind of timelessness, DP Daniel Katz’s beautifully atmospheric shots of the surrounding landscape another. But the story of a small family kept in fearful isolation by a familiar horror-movie curse is underpopulated and underplotted, making for a capably handled genre exercise without the novelty or depth to achieve anything memorable.
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After a brief prologue suggesting a hereditary affliction going back centuries, a hazily defined present (it could be anytime within the last 50 years) finds our principal characters living not so differently from their ancestors, farming and tending livestock. Ten-year-old Willow (Caoillinn Springall, who played the phantom girl opposite George Clooney in “The Midnight Sky”) is a somewhat sickly, asthmatic child without siblings or playmates. Living in a rural compound at once aristocratic and decrepit, she’s protectively minded by both mother Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings) and maternal grandfather Waylon (James Cosmo).
They’re all a bit stressed when it comes to the household’s fourth member, Noah (“Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington). When present, he’s a brash, mercurial, dominating husband and father, his authority somewhat resented by the equally bullish grandpa. But he’s frequently absent — and as Willow spies one day, he sometimes comes home nude, filthy and bloodied, as if he’d gone feral. Which, in fact, he has.
It doesn’t take his skittish daughter much longer to realize that dad, self-proclaimed “king of the woods,” runs amok with each full moon. For now, his gory appetites can be quenched by the unfortunate farm animals Imogen leaves to be ravaged after she’s shackled him in a nearby ruin. But as her grandfather notes, “He’s getting worse.” Inevitably, his own kin will be threatened by the next explosion of lycanthropic mayhem.
“The Beast Within” — not to be confused with Philippe Mora’s 1982 film of the same title, a cheerfully cheesier transformation-horror opus — has been thought out with care in the design departments. They stretch from the baroque details (i.e. antler chandeliers) in Russell De Rozario’s production design to the occasional trad-folk strains in Nathan Klein and Jack Halama’s effective original score. Katz’s widescreen cinematography delivers some gorgeous “enchanted forest” imagery of dark woods blanketed in mist, right out of a Grimm fairy tale.
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But while the pacing and performances are expert enough, the director and Greer Taylor Ellison’s script lacks the substance to stir much suspense, or empathy. Family dynamics feel artificial, with Willow precociously suspicious (and plagued by jump-scare nightmares) regarding her father’s nature from the start. Harington’s showy, frequently buck-naked turn might be better suited to a simpler kind of werewolf movie — like those in which Lon Chaney Jr. or Oliver Reed weren’t required to be more than two-dimensional, just scary.
“Beast” wants to be taken seriously as domestic psychological drama, however, albeit without building sufficient complexity and nuance for the job. There are hints that what’s really going on here is an indictment of patriarchal toxic masculinity. But that angle is developed too little, too late to seem more than a modish afterthought. Likewise there’s some vague import in Willow’s playing with a dollhouse and action figures (suggesting she might be manipulating larger events) that never quite comes into focus.
Farrell clearly wants to create “elevated” horror, succeeding to a degree in terms of quality acting and visual finesse. But the actual ideas that might lift this above ordinary genre fare fall short, while the vivid tension and anxious character identification needed to excel on a humbler plane never quite arrive. Within the ample annals of werewolf cinema to date, “The Beast Within” rates as a good-looking footnote, a polished diversion that in the end satisfies enough neither in revisionist nor traditional terms to stick in the mind.
Well Go US is releasing “The Beast Within” on U.S. screens July 26.
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