Michael Fairbanks
Ancestral Beasts was amongst my most anticipated titles playing at Fantasia Fest this year. Contemporary indigenous stories are all too rare in cinema, and the thought that one centered on the Mètis people could ride the current wave of indie horror was quite enticing. Sadly, Tim Riedel’s film settles for being an all too familiar wade into the terrors inflicted upon us by grief and crumbling mental health. One might hope that a unique cultural perspective could reframe those ideas, but beyond lip service, Ancestral Beasts hardly touches upon aspects unique to these characters’ identity. The goal is clearly to make this as universal as possible, and in pursuit of that, Riedel has managed to make one of the most generic films within this niche of horror. Quite an achievement.
We meet Elyse (Morgan Holstrom) as she grieves the loss of her mother by suicide. In the first scene, we see that a mysterious green hand was, in fact, the thing that drew Mom’s blood from her wrist, but nobody else saw that. Elyse needs to take some time off from both her service job and her cartoonishly uncaring sister Nikki (Darla Contois). She heads to her wellness podcaster aunt’s abandoned house and, after dealing with creepy elderly neighbor Max (Josh Strait), starts to realize that a change of scenery is not helping to clear her mind.
Perhaps the title Ancestral Beasts is meant to imply that mental health struggles are a type of monster that stalks generations. Groundbreaking stuff. Even so, I expected the creepy hand that we meet in that opening scene to be a tease of depression demons far more sinister to come. It isn’t. The entire physical opposing force of Ancestral Beasts is, in fact, this poorly rendered computer-animated hand that creeps and crawls around our heroine’s mental health crisis.
Naturally, this does not open many windows for set pieces. There are only two true scare sequences inside of this two-hour film, and both of them are identical. Elyse hears tapping and crawling inside the house; she looks for it (once by choice, once by force from her horrible sister), and then it launches at her, ready to choke. Perhaps this hand is meant to evoke self-harm in a sense—after all, the thing that can most easily harm the human body is itself. However, it is such a poorly realized “creature” that nearly every time it appears, it only elicits laughter and pity. I’m certainly no expert on Mètis folklore. I assume this hand is something pulled from their texts, but the film makes no effort to bring us into any of that research, if that is the case.
Morgan Holstrom conveys the proper emotion about half of the time. A great deal of time passes before anything beyond minor inconvenience happens to her. That pacing requires an actor who can sell deep hurt even when she isn’t speaking, and Holstrom just doesn’t cut it. She isn’t laughable during the big moments but is otherwise pretty unpolished. The same goes for Darla Contois as Nikki, who is unbearable to the point of parody. There is no reason why anyone would allow this person near them regardless of family bond. Riedel is trying to paint a portrait of two sisters with wildly different reactions to an unimaginable loss, but clearly, he sees women as ciphers who operate in sharp emotional polarities. It is baffling to me that a woman did not direct Ancestral Beasts. Since it is uninterested in the culture at hand, the least it could’ve done is given us some authentic perspective.
We don’t get to know this family beyond their bickering. No idea about what Elyse and Nikki’s lives were like when their mother was alive. Auntie is totally out of the picture, only heard via clips of her podcast. That becomes a trite tension device later on to tee up the lukewarm scares. Frankly, Max is the one who seems to have perceived the situation the most, and there’s no room for him and Elyse to connect on an emotional level because he’s a total jerk. Even though this type of subject matter in horror is becoming trite, I’m willing to engage with it if it’s thoughtfully done. I gave Evil Dead Burn a pass for this because of just how viscerally enraging it was. The only emotions Ancestral Beasts elicits are the ones the film is actively telling me the characters are feeling via dialogue.
Ancestral Beasts is a dull retread of a sect of horror that has veered into self-parody at this point. It grasps onto heavy themes without any ability to execute them in a moving or novel way. That would require me learning something about these people beyond “they’re sad” or “they’re mean,” and Riedel’s appallingly thin screenplay doesn’t even attempt to tap into the genuine potential of the culture it is drawing from. Should’ve been a total standout with this festival’s lineup. Now, I can only pray that it is the worst Fantasia has to offer.
