Bewere Wolves #1: The Beast Within
Bewere Wolves #1: The Beast Within (2024)
or It’s a Metaphor? I Mean, It’s a Metaphor.
I had initially thought to begin this series with a more informative overview of what, exactly, werewolves actually are in older and more local folklores that informed the later mass media depictions. You know, explore how mass media has created its own semi-definitive werewolf that obscures its own origins through its popularity and how all depictions will now exist in its shadow. I will get to that, but it’s not necessary here because, despite having a monster costume and everything, The Beast Within is not a werewolf movie. It’s almost a Metaphor movie. Not quite.
So what do I mean by a Metaphor movie? Now, not every movie employing metaphor is a Metaphor movie. To stick strictly to the Lord of the Rings Movies for a moment, there’s been a lot of words used to talk about how Saurman’s invoking of breeding programs and use of deforestation to fuel his war machine -the latter of which hastens his downfall- is an intentional parallel to industrialization and the cold logic of avarice in modernity despoiling and interfering with the natural world. The metaphor is there. But it would be reductive to call it a movie about that specifically. Part of what makes a movie a Metaphor movie, then, is that some element of the fiction –a group, a scenario, an important substance, ect. – standing in for something that exists in reality is central to understanding the story on any level deeper than following the plot. You don’t need to understand the specifics of the passing of The USA PATRIOT Act to understand Revenge of the Sith thematically. You can get “powerful people can manufacture and/or manipulate crises to give themselves more power” by watching it. The Babadook, on the other hand, is a thoughtfully made movie, but as a plot it is a fairly unremarkable haunting/possession movie in which love prevails. If you want to dip your toes into a non-literal but not engaging with the specifics interpretation, it could be a movie about passing into the umbra of madness and then fighting back through it, also with the power of love.
What gives the Babadook an identity that stands apart from similar movies is its specificity, how the monster sinks its claws into the main character by preying on the pain of her motherhood. It uses her resentment and distrust of her son to frame him, and mixes it with her skepticism of the supernatural to make him seem like the source of the problems, what with his tendency towards flights of fancy, anti-social behavior, and general gratingness. As a working mother and single widow with a troubled child, and untreated issues of her own, she is isolated and depressed already. Part of her already directs the blame for her situation towards her child even before things escalate. The monster, the tension it creates and threat it presents, brings the situation to a particularly dramatic boiling point, but it doesn’t really create any tension that wasn’t already there to a lesser degree. The Babadook is essentially the darkest and most psychotic –in a medical sense – possible impulses of postpartum, and more general, depression within the context of single motherhood given form. And the movie is not trying to be particularly subtle about this. And that is the other half of what makes a Metaphor movie, the creator wants you to make the comparison. Not that it’s all they’re interested in, but they want you to understand what the movie is “about” with some specificity. This is also why a debate over how literal a movie can end up being more academic than enlightening. If you grasp the parallels in the first place, you’ve understood the movie enough to understand the message however you interpret the details.
Most Metaphor movies are more specifically similes. They are leading you into going “Oh, this is like that.” Star Trek will sometimes do this directly by pointing out how their sci-fi situation is like an old problem humanity has matured past within the fictional universe. Rarer is a Metaphor movie which does not offer up points of comparison so directly. To explain the difference, let’s use some general concepts from Bladerunner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a broad example. Let’s say there are two pieces of fiction where the popular in-universe belief is that Androids are different from,and lesser than, humans specifically because they cannot feel empathy. In one, the Androids are actually capable of developing empathy, but are slandered to keep them disposable. They are up against clear discrimination. In the other, the Androids truly do lack it but are otherwise sapient and reasonable, but the protagonist comes to the realization that to place these beings outside our own empathy is to deprive ourselves of our humanity and subject them to unnecessary cruelty: “The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.” That first example is going to inevitably generate a response of “this is like the dehumanization of specific groups throughout history.” The second is not analogous to a real life group, with the androids acting as a stand-in for the truly alien and outside common experience. Both are anti-discriminatory thematically, but the former is about discrimination as we understand it, while the latter is more abstractly about open-mindedness towards the unknown. “What if robots were people?” is a different question to raise than “Should we treat a thinking robot with compassion even if it’s inhuman?”
This should not be confused with more allegorical movies, in which the meaning is more intentionally obscured or open to debate. And allegorical movies should not be confused with the more derogatory term that you may have occasionally seen , Allegory movie. The way the term allegory is used, when it’s invoked negatively, usually means that the fiction is not separable from its symbolism. Mother! is not trying to convince you of a world, or tell you a story of home renovation with a deeper meaning, it is constructed from the ground up with symbols and signifiers that are to be interpreted so a meaning can be made or deciphered by viewers. An allegorical movie that is either too difficult to decipher or too heavy-handed is likely to be accused of being an Allegory movie. Allegorical films are for more specific tastes than a Metaphor movie, generally, but they are not a metaphor that has grown too big, they are a distinct style. Mother! is not flawed in its approach. Nothing went wrong, metaphors did not get out of hand, it is deliberately structured like that. Its real problem is that it’s a longer, lukewarm Begotten, but that’s an issue for another, well, issue.
Sometimes you get a movie that moves past being a Metaphor through sheer bluntness. You can say Get Out is a movie about the commodification of black bodies and sound jargonistic out of context, but that’s not a statement of interpretation. The bodies of black people are literally a hot commodity to a coterie of wealthy freaks as a part of the explicit, surface plot text. This is why it gets called satire instead, it’s taking a sometimes abstract concept to a ludicrous conclusion to comment on the more mundane, subtle expressions of it.There are more similetic elements to specific parts, but at its most basic core it is creating a fictional, extreme example of a real-life issue rather than inventing a fictional issue that can be compared to a real one.
The Beast Within is none of those things. It is a rare type of movie. It is not even a heavy-handed Metaphor movie, it is a narrative told in such a way that it makes its own metaphor irrelevant by the end. It shoots past failure into a strange sort of achievement in self-negation.
The basic plot synopsis it that a sickly girl named Willow –played by Caoilinn Springall– lives in a dilapidated estate in the country with her mother and father – Ashleigh Cummings as Imogen and Kit Harrington as Noah– and her grandfather on her mother’s side – James Cosmo as Waylon –who lives in a trailer on the grounds outside of the house proper. There are no other major roles. There are about four other face actors total, who appear only briefly, plus a couple of costume performers for the werewolf suite. Something is wrong with Willow’s father. He has periods of being quiet and withdrawn, and then of volatility. He and the mother go through a routine, but strange, ritual where he is driven out from the property before nightfall with a pig in tow. The parents return, the pig does not. Willow is not allowed out after dark. She has also caught her father in a bizarre, agitated state that has led to nightmares and her barricading her door at night. Eventually she follows her parents into the woods and discovers their secret. He is a werewolf! Worse, she’s living out a metaphor for cyclical trauma and domestic abuse. And he might have never been a real werewolf, it could have all been her coping with him being a real monster. Or maybe they were feeling particularly clever, and he was a werewolf, and the flashback to the climax where he is just a man rather than a werewolf is actually the more symbolic ending: Willow has accepted that the monster was still a man and her father, and that there is some part of him in her, which is why she lingers at the end rather than leaves eagerly. At a glance? Plenty to analyze. Except, there’s a minor wrinkle.
Him being a werewolf doesn’t actually have any consequences independent of him being a real asshole. The lycanthropy ends up not representing anything not already in the movie. It is superfluous. Even accepting a reading where he is an abuser who happens to be a real werewolf, him being a genuine monster doesn’t add any unique tension. When he tries to carry out a family extermination at the climax of the film, it would not be much more or less tense if he had been a regular person the whole movie, and he seems deranged enough as man that he would have tried it outside of a transformation at some point. I will grant that the intention of the filmmakers was probably to make viewers feel that there had been some period of stability for Noah before he began to spiral, but you never see that. He says that he had kind eyes, eyes that are probably what attracted Imogen, but he never feels like a reliable enough narrator that the viewer should take that at face value. I think the creature design, with unusually large and expressive eyes, is trying to reinforce that, but we never see him being kind for more than a few moments, and he’s still a control freak in some way in the scenes containing those moments. I believe he never has a scene where he is straightforwardly nice. Maybe when he’s playing with a dog while the focus is on other characters, except he is visibly upset when Waylon gives it to Willow, so it feels a bit performative. And he murders it later.
Now the attempt at a metaphor is that the werewolf is a literalization of abuse passing down generationally. It’s a hereditary curse that makes the afflicted into monsters. Nice and easy to wrap your head around. But, the viewer is never given a view of what Noah may have looked without being afflicted. We don’t see a better version that deteriorates. There is a brief scene that shows the family, sans grandpa, all in bed on a sunny day where Imogen says “I love you when you’re like this.” That alone implies that he is already abusive. Later we get a slight extension of the scene where Noah incredulously asks what she means by that. His tone is aggressive. So when they show even more of the scene later –within a montage showing he was even more volatile in the past than we already saw – where he is yelling at Imogen about not saying these sorts of things in front of their daughter, it’s essentially superfluous. You know it went down bad. You’ve seen the rest of the movie by that point. So even this distant, brightly lit, and soft focused memory makes it clear he was already abusive by the time it happened. He gets worse as the plot unfolds, but viewers never see a time where he is “normal”. He is never a good man.
And that sort of thing carries into the scenes in the film’s present. When he describes being a werewolf to his daughter, it is all weepy and tender seeming at the end, but he starts it by manipulating her. She has seen a terrible thing, him transforming/carrying out some kind of ritual abuse, and her grandfather is insisting with increasing urgency that Willow needs to be removed from the home. She is in need of comfort. Part of his monologue is reassuring her that her grandfather is a good man, put a pin in that, and then he tells her that some people are not lucky enough to have that. He didn’t have one. His died early, after all. He is guilting her with how he sets up the tragic story of the curse. He’s doing a pretty classic bit of manipulation. He takes her worry, and finesses it into pity for him. They hug and bond, but it feels inauthentic on the father’s part, especially if the werewolf thing is ultimately a fanciful lie he fed her. But even this backstory doesn’t have much added by a werewolf narrative. The story is that Noah’s grandfather was a good man with this curse, which caused him to lose control and become violent. He fled into the woods to get away from his family, but accidentally killed his wife after she followed him out of curiosity. Noah’s father was plainly a hard, mean man. Noah is absolutely losing his shit. The thing about this story is that it’s hardly a metaphorical one, even with this talk of a curse and monsters. Take out the werewolf details and both the story and its deeper meaning remains surprisingly unaltered. A man had a problem that made him sporadically violent, the worst case scenario happened. His son who had to live thought this was more outwardly fucked up, and the son’s son winds up mentally disintegrating entirely by the end of the movie. That’s just a story of compounding abuse. The werewolf element doesn’t really have an additive quality. This is a microcosm of the movie's problem.
That’s not the only example. When Noah plays pretend in the woods with Willow, there’s a moment when he’s “knighting” and tells her to kneel, a repetition of a command already given, with an intensity that provokes a visceral, if momentary, discomfort in her. When they’re talking around the family car, he’s calm until he sees a dress hidden by his wife. Then he goes straight to calling his daughter a fucker and slapping food out of her hand, and we see later he was having a breakdown in the car after. Which is also a moment that doesn’t add much, smacking the car interior is not really an escalation of what we see. The reason he gets mad about the dress, in his words, is that he has a deep fear that she will leave him. If she isn't attractive –thus not attracting attention– or getting up to anything he doesn’t know about, there’s less risk she will connect to someone less difficult and leave him. He’s difficult because he's a werewolf, ostensibly. Except he is also persistently abusive throughout the film, so she has reasons to leave him without curse, and again, the viewer never sees a curse-less, stable slice of home life. Even a corny “when I turned [arbitrary age] the curse struck” would actually establish he was better before that point to some degree. And he could still be traumatized without a literal curse in the same way as he is.
When they are celebrating Willow’s birthday, he calls her a little monster before he gives her gifts. In another context this might be endearing, but over-identification can also be a tool of abuse. He is telling her with this nickname that she is like him. You see this in abusive dynamics, by telling someone you’re like them when you’re also a source of harm to them, you can accomplish a few things. You force them to identify with you when their instinct may be to recoil, it’s undermining their perspective. You can also isolate them: if you’re like me, you’re not like other people, we share this trait that they wouldn’t understand. I understand you even if I hurt you, something they can’t do, so you might as well stay in my orbit.
By telling a child in particular “you are like me”, you can instill a fear that makes them malleable. Are you not acting like me but struggle with dark thoughts? Well, then you’ll end up like me, so how can you judge? Did you lash out at me? Well, I lash out all the time, you’re doing it too, don’t you feel guilty? Did you do something you regret? Well, you can’t undo it, so why and try to do better? Why not come on down to my level, let me tell you what to do? It’s a little moment, but in the context of his other behavior, there’s not a reason to think this is anything other than another bit of needling. And I do think it is meant as a consequential moment even if it’s small. In the literal/double symbolic ending, calling Willow “little monster” is the last thing he does before getting lit on fire by her. It might be seen as a final provocation, and in realizing she was provoked rather than simply standing bravely against a monster, Willow understands she has a deep-seated anger too. Again though, you could yoink out the werewolf elements and still arrive at that ending. Once you understand Noah is abusive and has been abused – which is clear from very early on – curse or no, there’s nothing added to the story by the curse.
That he’s a werewolf does not shape the particulars of his abuse either. He says his grandfather changed specifically on full moons, which makes sense as a detail consistent with Noah if he really was killing pigs each time he was locked up, but none of the scenes feel all that distant from each other. I bring that up because if there was a temporal cycle to his behavior, he gets worse the closer it is to a full moon or something, that could be an interesting way to depict a relationship that isn’t consistently abusive, but where there are periods of alternating calm and fury. There could even be uncomfortable prodromal periods of withdrawal leading up to crescendos of abuse, which the first act does imply, but the whole movie seems like it could be happening over a very short amount of time, despite the multiple times he gets locked up (maybe it’s a more traditional multiple night full moon cycle rather than the specific day?), and he starts bad and is on a fairly straight trajectory down. The cycle of the beast is less significant if he’s perpetually beastly. Like I said, he comes across as an asshole that happens to be a werewolf if he ever was one, not an asshole because of the werewolf’s burden. Arguably, the more familiar you are with the more bespoke mechanics of abuse, the more superfluous the werewolf element becomes, rather than complimentary.
Arguable also is that a small element of Noah’s unreliability as a narrator is that he calls Waylon a good man. The two don’t like each other, and Imogen tells Waylon, when he tries to remove Willow without permission, that she won’t put up with him like her mother did. An interesting complication. If Waylon was himself abusive, Noah could throw that in Willow or Waylon’s face, but by accepting Willow’s positive view of her grandfather, he can really make the part about his own dying sting. And you get the sense that Noah doesn’t want to confront Waylon, he is relatively meek when face to face with him until he goes truly feral, so making grandpa a point of contention may not work well for him. This line from Imogen raises interesting questions. If she is acting out her own cycle of abuse, was there ever a good, kind-eyed Noah, or is she with him because of the familiarity of his domineering ways? Does Waylon not like Noah because he recognizes his own failings in Noah and wants to make amends in some way? Is his bringing the dog as a gift unannounced mostly out of concern, or is there a bit of the old Waylon in there provoking Noah for the sake of provocation? Is Waylon sorry for his own transgressions, or has the risk to a grandchild provoked by a somewhat independent realization about Noah that he hasn’t totally reflected on. Was Noah always a weasel, or did this aggression constructively help him stand up for Imogen at one point, and that’s why Waylon dislikes him rather than for more “pure” reasons? You can draw some conclusions, but the movie doesn’t really explore these points of intrigue. The movie is laser focused on Willow’s perspective, which might be admirable if it wasn’t tripping over itself in execution so badly. As is, it’s a moment that makes me want to see either a movie more committed to there being a supernatural element, or a more grounded film about abuse. To its credit, I think it mostly handles the abuse fairly sensitively –it's not an exploitative B-film or anything –other than the getting locked up at night and Willow barricading her own room inviting in speculation from casual viewers about sexual abuse I don’t think it necessarily means to imply, but it does come off like a bargain bin Pan’s Labyrinth at the end of the day. It’s competent in technical ways, but as a total package extremely clumsy.
Notes for completeness as a review: It’s always nice to look at, and it’s shot in a way where you always know where the focus is intended to be while things are happening elsewhere in frame. Sometimes in these monster movies you get lots of scenes that are empty of anything except you’re supposed to be paying attention to. I would say that the house fails to nail a 70-80s modern Gothic aesthetic. It’s too dilapidated to retain any regality, and not destroyed enough to be a beautiful ruin. It’s like a big house that used to be a hot property, but as a town grew it ended up farther and farther from the center of anything, to the point that eventually nobody really wants to pay the property tax even when the house itself becomes cheap, and if you could afford a nice house you’d probably get it in a newer upscale neighborhood, so now it’s only a matter of time until it gets condemned and turns into a tear down project. The traditional family portrait in the dining room sticks out rather than enhances the environment. The werewolf design is of the upright bipedal variety, with very little hair and big claws. It doesn’t scan as mangy to me like many do, it's more plain hairless, like a Xoloitzcuintle. With the big eyes and lack of fur, the head does look more like an immature bully breed dog than a wolf from some angles, which is not terribly intimidating. I will say, you see oxygen tanks used as explosives plenty. Less often as flamethrowers. That was hardcore.
I would also say some of the readings that “the curse” has passed on, in that Willow is on the path of her father, are a bit shallow. In some ways it has, she has a capacity for violence in her, and I would say she recognizes something of her father in herself at the end. But there is an important distinction to be made in that, when she remembered her make-believe but serious vow to protect her family before fire-roasting her father, she did something her father hadn’t in the course of the film. Even accepting she was partially provoked to anger on a more personal than defense of life level, Noah was never actually protecting his family. He was always controlling them. He was the threat, and he only reigned in his losing control as long as doing so functioned as a method of control. In saving her mother, Willow essentially acted as the person Noah pretended to be. She did so in an act of pretty gnarly violence, and there’s always risk of psychological damage in that, but she did actually make a hard choice that benefited someone else. Unless you were to interpret the end as an undoing of the initial noble framing of the act, and it was all for hate’s sake and self-preservation, but I think there is room for both anger and genuine protectiveness in the act.
There is significance in not seeing Willow leave at the end ,Noah mentions after saying his father was a cruel man that “I couldn’t leave… I couldn’t picture my life…” , after all. But we don’t see her choose to stay either. She has not become her father, but she is at a pivotal point on his journey. The choice of “being cursed”, to give into a hopeless acceptance of the cycle and her father’s treacly accusations of her being his “little monster” with all its painful familiarity, or leaving it behind for the unknown new. It ends with her not becoming her father, but with the difficult choice as to whether or not to do so. And I think that’s more interesting and honest than telling the viewer if she was better or the same, because in real life those aren’t branching paths. Abuse is a weight you have to carry through all the choices like that one. If she carries on like him, she’ll be choosing to be like him each and every time she acts like him. If she rejects him, each rejection will be a choice. And she’ll probably do a bit of both. I think it’s important to try to give thought and and credit to a creative work’s interesting decisions, even when the work is a mess as a whole.
Furthermore, I consider Palestine to need to be freed.