The Beast Within

A 'troubled kid' drama intermittently flagging itself as a supernatural thriller, this actually belongs in the less vaunted generic territory known as the 'bloody mess'. Young Frederik (Melville), alarmed by what he sees when he peeps in on mum's massage therapy, is taken with the idea that he's become 'the human beast' after supping from his girlfriend Henriette's witch's broth. When a dead cow lands on his beloved dad at his abattoir workplace, Frederik flips. The setting is a small backwoods town where all the grown-ups - two women and three men, including the vicar - seem to have known each other, in a murkily biblical but not very interesting way. The storyline flails like a cat drowning in a cauldron.