JP Nunez
I’m a sucker for all things monstrous, ghostly, and supernatural, so it should come as no surprise that The Monster Beneath Us was one of my most anticipated films at FrightFest this year. The title alone was enough to catch my attention, and when I read the plot synopsis and watched the trailer, I was completely sold. I was confident this would be one of the best movies of the entire festival, so I couldn’t wait to finally press play on my screener.
The Monster Beneath Us was written and directed by Sophie Osbourne, and it stars Becca Hirani, Jack Forsyth-Noble, Nicola Wright, and Marshall Hawkes. The film is set in England in the late 1800s, and it follows a grieving widow named Grace and her son, Charlie, as they move into a mansion that’s been owned by her late husband’s family for generations.
Soon after they arrive, they both discover that the place is home to a creepy supernatural entity, but unlike most spooks, this one isn’t entirely malevolent. Grace is scared stiff when she sees the creature, and she’s immediately convinced that it wants to harm her and her son. In contrast, Charlie approaches this spirit with a much more open mind, and it quickly becomes his only friend.
When The Monster Beneath Us began, I was totally on board. From the very first shot, this movie is saturated with an eerie atmosphere of dread and uncertainty, and that feeling doesn’t let up until the credits begin to roll. See, Grace and Charlie’s new house is big, old, and often dimly lit, so it can’t help but imbue everything these characters do, no matter how innocuous it may be, with an uncanny sense that something isn’t quite right.
Then, when the camera steps out onto the grounds surrounding the house, that atmosphere grows even thicker. There’s usually a dense layer of fog spread out as far as the eye can see, so you simply can’t escape the feeling that terrible things are about to happen.
On top of all that, the acting in The Monster Beneath Us is also pretty good. Everybody in this film has the prim and proper demeanor you’d expect from rich British people in the late 1800s, so I had no trouble buying into these characters or their stories. In fact, I came to like Grace and Charlie almost immediately, so I was sure I’d have a great time watching their lives descend into monstrous chaos.
But as the movie went on, I found myself becoming less and less interested in what I was seeing. Sure, the atmosphere was still there, the acting was still on-point, and the titular monster seemed pretty cool (even if it stayed mostly in the shadows), but somewhere in the second act, the story started to drag quite a bit.
The plot stopped moving forward, and the characters soon became paper thin. To be fair, The Monster Beneath Us does touch on a few weighty themes, like grief, loneliness, and depression, but it never goes into any depth with them. At best, the characters mention these ideas a couple of times, but the film never truly brings them to life.
Take Charlie’s social isolation, for example. The kid doesn’t have any friends (except the monster, of course, but he doesn’t really count), and there are a few scenes where the characters talk about his loner tendencies. But despite all that, you never feel that he’s particularly sad about it. Even when we see Charlie sitting by himself while his peers play games together, he seems pretty content to remain on his own.
I just never believed that this boy was truly lonely, and the other themes in The Monster Beneath Us are similarly mishandled. The movie tells us about them without showing how they actually impact the characters, so they all fall completely flat.
As the film dragged on, I hoped it would pick up the pace in the third act, but unfortunately, the final 20 minutes or so merely cemented my disappointment with it. This part of the movie finally shows us the monster in all its hideous glory, and that completely kills all its effectiveness.
This creature is brought to life by CGI rather than practical effects, and while it doesn’t look terrible, it’s not all that good either. You can tell that it’s not physically there with the actors, and it sometimes moves with a stiffness that comes across as nearly robotic. I simply didn’t believe that thing was real, so I wasn’t scared for any of the characters.
I often say that horror is at its best when you care about the people in danger, and the opposite is also true. If you don’t care about the characters, the scares won’t work either, and unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens here. Not only were these people paper thin, but I couldn’t buy into the threat the monster posed to them, so the horror in the third act just didn’t move me in any way.
That was the final nail in the coffin for me, and like I said, it cemented my disappointment with The Monster Beneath Us. Granted, this film has an awesome atmosphere and some very good acting, but at the end of the day, it’s all style and no substance. In fact, by the time the credits begin to roll, even the style is greatly diminished, so if this movie comes to a VOD platform or a theater near you sometime in the future, I wouldn’t recommend checking it out.
The Monster Beneath Us had its world premiere at FrightFest on August 24.
