Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Tim Riedel’s Ancestral Beasts follows a well-trodden path of familial roots, burying the past, and learning to move on. But it fails to generate anything meaningful and fresh for the conversation. It arrives in the world merely as an amalgam of better films with more gripping performances, better scripts, and better creature designs. The Indigenous cast—featuring Morgan Holmstrom (Outlander, Shadow of the Rougarou), Darla Contois (Little Bird), Gail Maurice (Aberdeen), and Asivak Koostachin (HBO’s Duster)—adds a culturally engaging layer to the otherwise trite storyline; yet it neither elevates the material nor makes a significant or profound enough dent.
Elyse (Holmstrom) finds her sister toxic and overbearing. When tensions snap, she leaves her behind and travels back to their childhood home to recenter and recharge her mental health. While in town, Elyse reconnects with old loved ones and her heritage, feeling more alive than she has in a very long time. But ever since she’s been back in town, there’s also a darkness that’s been stalking her and seeks to rip her alife apart. Her relationships continue to greatly suffer, and it’s only a matter of time before it finally consumes her whole. A centipede-like tentacle manifests itself as a byproduct of long-ignored, unresolved trauma from her youth.
Physical manifestation of trauma horror films exploded after Jennifer Kent’s 2014 psychological horror film The Babadook. The general trend is much more about any real external threat than the one raging inside all of us. But there’s such a thing as oversaturation. 12 years later, a sizeable chunk of horror films these days are rooted in manifestation rather than an actual monster. As in the case of Ancestral Beasts, it all feels too familiar, too undercooked, and too reductive. It’s a regurgitation of tropes and cliches we’ve been spoon-fed for more than a decade by far superior stories. Here, it’s about eight years too late.
Riedel bases the story partly on his mother’s survival of The Sixties Scoop, a period during which Canadian policies legalized the forceful removal of Indigenous children to white families, and saw the filmmaker consulting Indigenous Elders, knowledge keepers, trauma-informed experts, and academics. While the historical and emotional foundation is undeniable, there’s a lack of biting vision and commentary to take the concept from the paper to the screen. As a result, Ancestral Beasts limps from story beat to character reveal at an agonizingly glacial pace.
The film features several surprisingly artistic and thoughtful shots, particularly when Elyse navigates in her family home’s crawl space. The bright spots reveal a filmmaker with promise, but they don’t sustain interest for long. These illuminated moments are scattered so far apart that it’s easy to miss the dreamy traces of creative nuance. Ancestral Beasts doesn’t make so much as a throaty growl of fear or intrigue to keep the audience invested. Given the extensive pre-production, it’s rather unfortunate.
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