Father doesn’t know best in The Beast Within. That’s because every full moon, he turns into a werewolf, requiring him to be chained in the British wilderness to keep his loved ones safe and sound.
Eternals’ Kit Harington headlines as Noah, the current owner of the gosh-darned generational curse. “I am a coward and I am a monster,” he says to his 10-year-old daughter, Willow (Caoilinn Springall, Stopmotion), who’s begun to suspect as much anyway. Kids these days be smart.
With Within, documentarian Alexander J. Farrell (Making a Killing) makes a move to fictional features. This first attempt is inauspicious, however, being laboriously paced and predictable; regarding the latter, when the script introduces Willow as suffering from life-or-death breathing issues, you know Farrell’s doing so to establish Chekov’s oxygen tank. With intended scares overly dependent on either the eye-through-keyhole variety or the just-a-dream conceit, the movie plays too conventionally.
And not conventionally enough, where the werewolf is concerned: rarely spotted outside of shadows and, when he is, clearly built in cash-deficient CGI that belies the beauty of the West Yorkshire forest. Either way, we’re left wanting more. Like the scene with the splinter plunged underneath one’s fingernail — at least that, we feel.
While The Beast Within is not a remake of 1982’s same-named raping cicada movie, maybe it should be? —Rod Lott