Film Review — "The Beast Within"
“I love you when you’re like this.”
I won’t lie. I watched The Beast Within because I wanted to see Kit Harington naked, and I’m not ashamed to say it.
Mind you, it’s not as if I’d never ogled his bare ass before. I’ve seen the Jon-Dany love scene from Game of Thrones! And what finally convinced me to start Industry (a show that dares to ask, “What if investment bankers in London were super hot and fucked all the time?”) was that gif of him stepping out of a swimming pool with nothing on. So, obviously, when I learned about this Kit Harington werewolf movie, I didn’t think twice about it.
Maybe I should’ve, though…
The funny thing is that I was never really a Jon Snow girlie back in the Game of Thrones days. I was Robb Stark guy (duh), and then, controversially among my friends, a Ramsay Bolton admirer later on. (Psychoanalyze me at your own peril.) I dunno, I guess I prefer the bearded, slightly older, rather bulkier version of Kit Harington we have now.
With that said, I’m pleased to report that The Beast Within delivers the one specific thing I had hoped for—buff Kit in the buff—but not much of it, or much else.
Kit plays Noah, a man beset with a type of lycanthropy who lives in a secluded compound deep in the English wilderness with his wife Imogen and their daughter Willow. Due to Noah’s known condition, everyone has strict rules and routines to abide by. Any transgression could lead to catastrophe.
Unlike other werewolf pictures, Noah is not mauled and subsequently infected by another wolf-beast. He is what he is well before the film opens, and the family functions accordingly. Willow is the only one who doesn’t fully comprehend her father’s nature and how it affects his relationship with Imogen and Imogen’s father, who frequently visits and is all too aware of what his son-in-law does at night.
The story unfolds from Willow’s point of view. For all intents and purposes, the family compound and its surroundings are Willow’s entire universe. She’s a sickly kid who spends a lot of time in her room, a safe space where her childly imagination shapes her perspective of the world and helps her process what she sees, which lends itself well to genre storytelling.
Caoilinn Springall, who played the Little Girl in Stopmotion, plays Willow and shows yet again that she’s one to watch. Too few juvenile actors can find the sweet spot between overdoing it and not doing enough—let alone figure out how to live in the moment and truly just be—but Springall demonstrates a penchant for it. Given the film is largely told from her POV, much of what we learn is via her looking at and listening to the drama, and Caoilinn Springall really flourishes in those quieter (for her) moments. I’m keen to see how her technique modifies in the years to come.
So, with Willow being the real protagonist of the film, Kit Harington doesn’t have as much screen time as I’d like, personally. Noah is a principal character, of course; it’s his disorder that plagues the family and fuels the story, but he isn’t the main character. Nonetheless, his spirit looms. Even when Noah is not physically in a scene, his presence is still palpable. You could say his allusive fangs have a hold on everyone’s throat, even ours.
“Allusive” because, annoyingly—and I don’t think this is giving anything away, not really—The Beast Within is yet another contemporary horror flick that can be filed under the category of Metaphor Horror. Look, as long as horror has existed, horror creators have used creatures and conditions as symbols. This is nothing new. What grinds my gears is the current trend of “elevating” the subtext to The Text. It’s kind of insulting, honestly.
Anyone who’s paying attention should not need an explanatory closing montage that attempts to dramatically re-contextualize what we’ve already parsed. I mean, what Noah’s lycanthropy “is” is laid out pretty clearly throughout the film with visual cues. My favorite one is Noah’s throne-like dinner table chair. Such a big, ornate seat says—practically screams—a lot about the type of man who occupies it, especially when the woodworking of the other chairs is so menial by comparison. More movies should leverage their art department to tell the story, to be frank.
If you are going to rely on your actors to do the heavy lifting, however, you can’t go wrong with Kit Harington. Noah may not be the hero, but he is a celestial body whose orbit everything revolves around, and Kit bears the load well. He endows the character with the sort of dimensionality that only a child who’s seen the absolute best and worst versions of their parent can. So, while we do see Noah in various states [of undress], we don’t get to observe him from every conceivable angle, unfortunately.
Bottom line, two more servings of Cake Harington Kit Harington could’ve fixed this. (I’m not sorry.)
