'Ancestral Beasts' Review: An Ambitious but Uneven Horror Exploration - Fantasia 2026
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Becca Johnson - July 23, 2026
A directorial debut from Tim Riedel, Ancestral Beasts blends themes of mental illness with an eerie creature feature to create a thought-provoking horror unlike any other. After cutting ties with her sister, Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom) retreats to her ancestral home to rebuild her mental health. Her journey toward healing is derailed when a grotesque creature begins to stalk her, feeding on her emotional turmoil and forcing her to confront the past she tried to escape, or lose herself and those she loves.
Ancestral Beasts boasts confident thematic exploration that’s solidified by a strong leading performance from Morgan Holmstrom, as well as expert creature design, despite the slow pace and sparsity of the horror letting it down slightly.
Horror and mental health have long gone hand in hand, but few films have combined the two as intimately and effectively as Ancestral Beasts. At its core, this is a story about the familial strain of mental illness: how it can be passed down through generations, shape entire family dynamics and leave those affected feeling trapped within patterns they did not create. Sometimes, the only way to begin healing is to break those habits and sever the ties that keep them alive. Ancestral Beasts gives this idea a literal, monstrous form, with Elyse's inherited struggles manifesting as a physical creature. Again, it is a concept we have seen in horror before, but rarely with such a strong connection to family and generational trauma. Initially terrified of the beast, Elyse gradually begins to understand it, eventually learning to exert a degree of control over it and even give it orders. The creature is not simply an external evil to be defeated; it is a part of her. That idea makes for incredibly effective commentary on mental health, suggesting that recovery is not necessarily about destroying the parts of ourselves we fear, but learning to understand and manage them on our own terms.
Morgan Holmstrom's (The Order) lead performance is the beating heart of Ancestral Beasts' commentary. She gives a deeply committed and emotional turn as Elyse, fully embracing the physical and psychological demands of the role. Whether she is displaying anger towards her overbearing, passive-aggressive sister or recovering from a panic attack while listening to her self-help podcast, Holmstrom remains consistently believable, grounding the film's more heightened ideas in something recognisably human. Unfortunately, the supporting performances are not quite as effective, with the limitations of the film's low-budget production and perhaps a lack of experience occasionally showing. The writing of these characters does little to help matters, either, with some feeling more like broad archetypes than fully developed people. This is particularly true of the man living next door to the family home, who is reduced to little more than a caricature. The result is a film whose central performance is considerably stronger than much of the surrounding cast and material, seemingly like almost all of the attention is paid to the main character and very little applied anywhere else.
Ancestral Beasts is very much a slow-burn film, one that is frequently engaging without ever managing to sustain that engagement consistently. Horror fans may be disappointed by the relative lack of scares; while the creature design used to represent mental illness is genuinely eerie and effective, it is deployed only sporadically, as is the bloodshed and occasional bursts of body horror that make up the remainder of the film's more traditional horror elements. Instead, much of the film is built around Elyse’s emotional turmoil and heated family discussions, particularly with her mean, imperious sister. These initially prove compelling, particularly as the characters' generational struggles begin to emerge, but the repetition of these ideas eventually starts to wear thin. There are certainly bursts of visual flair, particularly in the use of the remote house setting and Joey Forte's confident cinematography, which gives the film an atmospheric sense of isolation. However, these strengths are ultimately undermined by uneven pacing, repeated themes and a final outcome that becomes increasingly easy to predict given the direction of the narrative. The result is a film with some genuinely effective ideas and imagery, but one that struggles to develop them with enough consistency to maintain its impact.
The result of Ancestral Beasts is an ambitious and often effective exploration of mental health and generational trauma, elevated by Morgan Holmstrom's committed central performance and an impressively eerie creature design. However, its uneven pacing, repetitive ideas and limited scares prevent it from reaching its full potential. There is enough here to admire, particularly in its themes and visual flair, but it ultimately settles somewhere in the middle of the road.
'Ancestral Beasts' premiered at Fantasia Film Festival 2026 on July 22, 2026.
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