‘Ancestral Beasts’ Review: Promising Debut That Never Takes Off [Fantasia]

I really wanted to like Red River Métis director Tim Riedel’s debut Ancestral Beasts, which had its World Premiere at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival after first appearing at the 2025 Cannes Festival as a Frontieres Platform Project. There’s considerable talent backing the project, and considerably more intrigue in its singular approach to intergenerational trauma among Indigenous persons in rural Canada. Yet, while it all sounds good on paper, Ancestral Beasts is all promise, shackled by the dusty old cobwebs of horror’s seminal haunted houses.

To Ancestral Beast’s credit, Riedel has the foundational elements down pat, and there’s no denying the clear love for—and personal connection to—the material, which circumvents some familiar genre fatigue. Yet, that remaining fatigue is a haunt unto itself, and Riedel’s more unique elements are ham-fisted into a lackluster, contrived, and at times unpolished haunted house horror show.

Morgon Homstrom’s Elyse does her best, though the script regularly saddles her lead performance with stilted, trauma-centric dialogue, so much so that Elyse is less a person, more a vessel for profound historical injustice. Had Ancestral Beasts opted for a less conventional narrative path, the static Elyse-as-lead might have worked, though the performance is numb in a film that otherwise demands big, emotional reveals.

An early and bloody prologue features the death of Elyse’s mother off-screen, a victim of something supernatural Elyse herself will encounter after she takes time off for a mental health break at her aunt’s rural cabin, only to discover a sinister presence inhabiting the home. Her older sister, Nikki (Darla Contois)—fondly named She Devil in her phone—is overbearing. The thematic threads are already strained as Riedel opts to literalize Nikki’s transition into maternal support for her sister rather than letting audiences clue themselves into the otherwise conspicuous dynamic between them.

The horror simmers rather than boils, and Riedel throws sundry disparate genre elements into Ancestral Beasts’ blender, diluting the cocktail with too much, too soon. There’s the rotating door of family members Elyse meets, a gym owner interested in some hanky-panky, and a creepy neighbor culled straight from Tobe Hooper’s register. Eventually, the film settles into an indigenous take on , only here, the tactility of that enduring monster is replaced with a cool, though obviously digital, take on literalized mental illness.