The Beast Within is directed by Alexander J. Farrell who previously directed Refugee (2018). 

A movie that attempts to blend your typical werewolf movie with the theme of domestic abuse…and it goes  about as well as you would expect. 

The saving grace of this movie is Kit Harrington’s performance the way he’s able to play both a gentle father and terrifying beast works incredibly well and is about the only thing this film manages to really offer in terms of good quality. 

The rest of the movie is nothing but a huge mess of cheap allegories that aren’t nearly as clever as the movie thinks they are. Very cliched werewolf tropes that have been seen one hundred times before and one particular allegory that treats domestic abuse with the same care as a cheesy horror movie. I’m not exactly sure how anyone in the writers room thought this was a good idea especially with the execution they went with, because this really shows a lack of care or knowledge about domestic abuse as a topic. 

Sure some of the blueprints are there and I can kind of see the connection with this whole “we have a beast inside of us” type of deal, but the movie is so poorly executed and just a huge chore to watch that it doesn’t even matter. 

The Beast Within is available on all VOD platforms.

1/10 F